Participation in landscape conservation schemes in Italy Patrizia Borsotto*, Roberto Henke*, Maria Carmela Macrì*, Cristina Salvioni ** . *National Institute of Agricultural Economics (INEA), Rome, Italy. ** University G.d’Annunzio –DASTA, Pescara, Italy. contact address: salvioni@unich.it Abstract The objective of this paper is to provide for the first time an empirical investigation of participation decisions to landscape conservations schemes in Italy. Although the high emphasis given to this issues and the increasing resources devoted to these payments in Italian regional Rural Development Programs, farmers participation rate is still very low. A better understanding of what motivates farmers to participate may help increasing the effectiveness of the schemes and increasing adoption. In this paper we use the data on 2226 household farms located in three Northern regions -Alto Adige, Lombardy and Piedmont- extracted from the RICA-FADN sample to estimate a discrete choise model to identify the variables that affect the probability of participating to a landscape conservation scheme. The results of the model suggest the existence of interesting interactions between landscape conservation, organic farming, livestock production and location of the farm in the montains. Résumé Dans l’Union Européenne, divers services environnementaux fournis par le secteur agricole, comme le maintien du paysage, sont rémunérés par les mesures agro-environnementales. Utilisant un modèle probit univarié, nous analysons le comportement des agriculteurs italiens éligibles à la mesure de protection du paysage. Les résultats économétriques, basés sur un échantillon de 2226 agriculteurs de trois régions italienne, montrent la presance des effets de interaction entre le du maintien paysage, l’agriculture biologique, l'élevage et l'agriculture de montagne.