Vincent de Leijster

150 Chapter 7 payments for ecosystem services may also influence the economic outcome (Section 1.4). In Chapter 4 we found that the economic performance of agroecological almonds was improved by greening subsidies and by private price premiums, but that compensation for ecosystem services (such as soil carbon storage and erosion control) were less effective. Vegetation cover practices (such as no tillage and green manure) resulted in opportunity costs and larger price premiums and/or larger greening payments than are currently paid. In the present situation these costs are not compensated by income from premiums or greening payments. For coffee, we found that farmers who were members of an association received higher prices for their coffee (Figure A6-7) and had higher net revenues (Table 6-4). These associations sold coffee directly to traders as a high quality, specialty product, thus cutting out themiddleman. Furthermore, we found that certification did not significantly affect farm-gate prices or net revenue, and we found that compensation for carbon sequestration provided lower potential returns than timber production. In both case studies, payments for carbon had a lower potential for influencing the economic outcome, and this is mostly explained by the low price of on average €2.85 / t CO 2 in voluntary markets (Hamrick and Gallant, 2017) , which is only 5.8% of the actual social costs of carbon (€49/ t CO 2 ; Wang et al., 2019). Nevertheless, in both case studies price premium instruments were an effective tool for improving economic performance. With this information I can now place the case studies in the agroecological transition model and discuss their pathways of economic performance. For almond orchards I found that while undergoing the transition (green circle in Figure), economic performance may either decrease or improve over time, depending on the type of agroecological practices that are applied (Figure 7-2a). Compost may improve economic performance, while vegetation cover may reduce it. It is still uncertain how the economic performance of the final almond agroecological system (yellow circle) will develop, but here I describe some scenarios. (1) Vegetation cover further reduces almond productivity, leading to even lower economic performance with no incentives being implemented to compensate this. (2) The loss in yield due to vegetation covers stabilizes, and as a result economic performance stabilizes and no incentives are implemented. (3) The loss in yield due to vegetation cover stabilizes and as a result economic performance stabilizes, without external incentives such as price premium or greening subsidies being implemented to improve economic performance. (4) Compost and vegetation cover are combined, which balances out the negative impacts of vegetation cover. (5) The improvement of yield by compost stabilizes and no incentives are provided. (6) The improvement of yield by compost continues, or external incentives that improve economic performance are provided. Now, I can only recommend further studies to examine