Risk attitudes between Argentine farmers: what determines willingness to take risks?

Farmers cope with a wide range of risk sources in the agricultural activity, and set risk management strategies even when their risk attitudes may not be fully explicit. This paper aims to understand how Argentine farmers shape their risk attitudes, using a large database of producers located in the country's main cropping area. To this purpose, we run different probit models that involve a group of socioeconomic variables associated with farmers' willingness to take risks. We find several results, among others, that age has a negative impact on willingness to take risks, while education and sales level have a positive influence. Higher land ownership is associated with higher risk aversion. Additionally, we provide a first non-conditional exploration on the impact of risk attitudes on management decisions. We find some interesting results, for instance, prone-to-risk farmers show a higher incidence in the use of future markets and business diversification.