Stay in dairy? Exploring the relationship between farmer wellbeing and farm exit intentions

Farm numbers in western countries have declined rapidly over the last decades, driven by advances in technology and productivity. In parallel with this development, the concept of wellbeing, encompassing an individual's satisfaction with different aspects of their life, has received increased attention in literature. However, few studies have explored the role of farmer wellbeing in relation to farm exit. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore whether wellbeing relates to intentions to keep up or exit dairy farming. Due to imbalanced data sets and choice of statistical methods, farm exit studies often suffer from low explanatory power, limiting the ability to draw conclusions. Therefore, in this study we apply XGBoosting, random forests and smoothing splines to analyse the data. Data were collected from 1288 Norwegian dairy farmers. The results show that farmer age together with three dimensions of farmer wellbeing; working situation, quality of life and mental health are associated with intentions to keeping up or to exit dairy farming. As expected, increasing farmer age increases the probability of farm exit. Among important farmer wellbeing items are degree of optimism and loneliness, possible health worries, satisfaction with workday, suitable workload during weekends and feeling valued as a farmer. The results also show that modern statistical learning methods may contribute to make the most of farm exit studies. The findings have implications for farmers, extension services and agricultural politicians. •Wellbeing is a useful concept to understand farmers' exit intentions.•Working situation, quality of life and mental health relate to exit intentions.•Intention to exit farming increases with farmer age.•Modern statistical learning methods are well suited for farm exit studies.