Round  1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

It has been a great honor, as well as a pleasantly challenging activity, to review the article entitled ”A global review of farmers’ perceptions of agricultural risks and risk management strategies”.

In the present article, the authors have carried out a detailed analysis of one of the most important challenges of modern agriculture, namely, farmers' perception of the risks that agriculture can face (especially primary production) and the strategies that need to be addressed to manage these risks.

As it is known, the considerable expansion of international trade over the past decades has also contributed to the expansion of risks associated with primary food production.

From this standpoint, the paper approaches a highly interesting topic for the agricultural and food chain, a topic that is equally interesting to producers (farmers) and consumers.

The paper is structured following the classic model and comprises 5 main parts: introduction; materials and methods; results; discussion, and conclusion. The 5 major components of the paper are balanced dimension-wise and presented coherently and logically, tightly linked to one another.

The used determination methods are appropriate for the established aim. They are accurately described and facilitated important results of both theoretical and practical importance.

The performed studies have highlighted the presence of several factors that may affect primary production and which constitute risk factors perceived as such by farmers. A significant proportion of these factors (almost 50%) represents a direct risks for primary production.

The obtained results exhibit some similarities to previous ones, but some more or less significant differences as well.

The article is well documented and all the authors mentioned in the bibliographic references list are quoted at least once in the text of the paper. Practically, the paper benefits from an abundant bibliography; what is more impressive is that there are no omissions with regard to cited authors.

Moreover, the paper includes a relevant graphical component for studied aspects. I am referring here to tables and figures, which provide the described in-text elements with increased credibility.

I would advise the authors to be more careful with regard to the bibliography: it is preferred that the cited authors be mentioned in alphabetical order, and references without specified authors be mentioned at the end of the list of references, in chronological order. I also recommend using a single system not only in citations, but also when it comes to the journals. I am referring here mainly to mentioning the following elements for each consulted article: journal, volume, issue and pages (the DOI may also be mentioned, should the author so desire, but the basic descriptive elements are the previously mentioned ones).

For example: page 13, lines 426-428 (number 7 in the references list): Harwood J., Heifner R., Coble Keith, Perry Janet, Somwaru A., 1999. Managing Risk in Farming: Concepts, Research, and Analysis. Market and Trade Economics Division and Resource Economics Division, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Economic Report No. 774, 1-130 (https://www2.ctahr.hawaii.edu/agrisk/pdfs/gnrlRMA/Managing%20RiskInFarming.pdf).

Another example: page 13, lines 429-430 (number 8 in the references list): Hardaker J.B., Lien G., Anderson J.R., Huirne R.B.M., 2015. Coping with Risk in Agriculture. 3rd Edition. Applied Decision Analysis. CAB International Publishing Company, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK (https://books.google.ro/books?hl=ro&lr=&id=iyzHCQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR1&dq=coping+with+risk+in+agriculture+hardaker&ots=-hqLgM4uA-&sig=PNziiY1uCS1fkeIq7Yeb2cSLMtM&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=coping%20with%20risk%20in%20agriculture%20hardaker&f=false).

Another example: page 13, lines 431-432 (number 9 in the references list): Mankad A., 2016. Psychological influences on biosecurity control and farmer decision-making. A review. Agronomy for Sustainable Development (or JCR Abbreviation – Agron. Sustain. Dev.), 36:40. DOI 10.1007/s13593-016-0375-9 (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs13593-016-0375-9.pdf).

Another example: page 14, lines 457-459 (number 21 in the references list): Sternberg Lewerin Susanna, Österberg Julia, Alenius S., Elvander Marianne, Fellström C., Tråvén Madeleine, Wallgren P., Persson Waller Karin, Jacobson Magdalena, 2015. Risk assessment as a tool for improving external biosecurity at farm level. BMC Veterinary Research (or JCR Abbreviation – BMC Vet. Res.), 11:171. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12917-015-0477-7.

As for the paper grammar, the article is generally very well written: only a few shortcomings in the grammar of the text can be mentioned, as follows:

Page 2, line 63 – modify ,,(…) to review the existing (…).’’

Page 2, line 83 – replace ,,agricultur*’’ with ,,agriculture*’’;

Page 5, line 143 – replace ,,for farmers’’ with ,,by the farmers’’;

Page 5, line 144 – replace ,,are most’’ with ,,are the most’’;

Page 6, line 156 – replace ,,most cited’’ with ,,the most cited’’;

Page 6, line 161 – replace ,,was most strongly’’ with ,,was the most strongly’';

Page 8, line 194 – replace ,, at lowest costs’' with ,, at the lowest costs’’;

Page 9, line 225 – modify ,,(…)  barriers to the management of agricultural risks.’’

Page 9, line 236 – replace ,,depends heavily’’ with ,,heavily depends’’;

Page 9, line 248 – replace ,,class’’ with ,,classify’’;

Page 10, line 267 – replace ,, are at best’’ with ,, are at the best’’;

Page 10, line 284 – replace ,,exist’’ with ,,exists’’;

Page 11, line 309 – replace ,,to long’’ with ,,to a long’’;

Page 11, line 311 – replace ,,interact’’ with ,,interaction’’;

Page 12, line 356 – replace ,,First’’ with ,,Firstly’’;

Page 12, line 393 – replace ,,We have also’’ with ,,We also have’’.

As a general conclusion regarding the grammar, the text do not contains other mistakes that need to be corrected. As for the editing (writing) part is concerned, the text should be checked once again carefully.

The article itself, as any other article, has certain improvable aspects. By these aspects, I mean the major constituting parts of the article, but also some elements that are related to details or writing. However, the article as a whole is a highly original one and can be considered interesting for academic staff, for researchers in the field and even for the wide public.

Together with the other positive elements, the scientific relevance and the quality of the presentation make the article attractive to a wide public, and particularly to authors interested in agriculture, sustainable development of agriculture, primary production, food quality and food safety.

Provided that the authors revise their paper and improve on the elements mentioned above, the paper may be published in the Agriculture.

            Best Regards,

            Reviewer

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your valuable comments and suggestions to help improve our manuscript. 

Please refer to the attached file for point-to-point responses.

Warm regards,

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper provides a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature to identify the major sources of agricultural risks perceived by farmers, common risk management strategies employed, linkages between risk sources and risk management strategies, socio-economic factors affecting both and the barriers to managing agricultural risks.

The paper is clearly written, uses an appropriate methodology, and draws interesting conclusions. However, certain aspects of the analysis should be further elaborated for clarity. The following issues should be addressed by the authors in a revision.

1.       The PRISMA methodology

While the general outline is well explained, a number of steps should be further elaborated. For example,

-          Search strategy – were only papers with quantitative results included or also qualitative ones? (on p. 4 line 138 we are told that all of the studies presented results from analysing primary data, but this was not mentioned as a screening criterion).

-          The latest cutoff date for papers was mentioned (p. 2) but I assume that no start date was included so that 1985 was the first ever published paper that looked at these issues? (Figure 2). This should be made clear in the screening section. The authors should defend why they think articles published in the 1980s might still have relevance for the topic under investigation today, and why they did not use a cut-off year.

-          P. 2 line 89. Identified articles were screened by keywords and large majority were excluded. Authors should explain what led to this result.

-          P. 3, line 92. The authors say that the articles were screened, but not how. Was the screening done by the authors themselves?  By how many authors was each article read?  324 articles were excluded because they did not meet the eligibility criteria – what were the criteria used to exclude articles at this stage?

-          Categorisation. Literature was categorised into seven categories of risk. The categories themselves are clearly explained, except that technological risk was ‘separated’ from production risk after weather and climate risk and biosecurity threats were first taken out. Use of the word ‘separated’ suggests that there is a residual production risk that does not fall into these three categories. This should be explained and what happened to this residual category.

-          Also, who did the categorisation and how it was done is not described. Was every article read by at least two people? How were borderline decisions handled?

2.       Figures and tables.

In Figures 3 and 4 and Tables 1 and 3, N is given equal to 197. But take Figure 1 which is the distribution of risk sources as identified in the review. We are told (p. 4, line 136) that 12% (23 studies) only dealt with risk management, therefore by definition these could not be included in the population of studies used to construct Figure 1 and N cannot be equal to 197. Similar remarks apply to the three other graphics.  Unless the authors can provide an explanation, these figures and tables would appear to be incorrectly constructed.

Table 3 contains a list of 12 risk management strategies. One assumes that these are strategies identified by the authors, and that they have assigned specific strategies mentioned in the papers to these categories. I am surprised that all of the possible strategies that might be identified in the papers are exhausted by the 12 categories and that there is no need for an Other or residual category. The authors should explain better how they assigned factors mentioned in the papers to their 12 categories.

3.       Linkage between perceived risk sources and management

The intuition behind the use of the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient could be better explained. How exactly should we interpret an association (or lack of it) between risk sources and management strategies.

The authors highlight in various places an alleged mismatch between perceived risks and risk management strategies (line 286, and particularly line 366). This is based on the fact that 11% of studies based on N=197 highlighted this. But only 93 studies dealt with both perceptions of risks and management responses, so is it relevant to use the whole sample? Even with this change, it could be argued a majority of studies did not report this mismatch (only 10 studies reported mismatch), so why do the authors stress this so much?

4.     Editorial.

Page 7 line 182. There is a half-sentence here which is incomplete.

Page 10 line 271-2.  This sentence seems awkward. It says that farmers in the review were not likely to adopt new technology “given the vital role of innovative new technologies in agricultural sustainability and increasing agricultural output”. The reason given would seem to support why farmers would adopt new technology, not why they do not adopt it.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your insightful comments and suggestion to help improve our manuscript.

Please refer to the attached file for point-to-point responses.

Warm regards,

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx