The Design of a Contract Farming Model for Coffee Tree Replanting

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 3)

The authors improved the document by making the suggested changes.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Author(s),

The reviewed article has not enough characteristics of a scientific work, because:

1/ the research problem highlighted in the title and concerning the relationship between the contract  farming and coffee trees replanting is very poorly justified ;

2/ literature review does not explain the essence of the problem with coffee trees replanting (it is not known why this is an important economic problem and what role the contract farming should play in solving it );

3/ the research objective is formulated too generally;

4/ in the whole article there is too much general description of the Soft System Methodology , and definitely not enough precise procedure leading to the development of the contract farming model for coffee trees replanting ;

5/ the method of collecting the empirical material for research was too poorly explained (it is not known how many respondents were there, what were the criteria for their selection, what was the importance of their opinions in solving the main research problem);

6/ the conceptual model (fig. 2) requires a much broader interpretation than it was done in the article. First of all, it is important to explain in detail which of the factors listed in Figure 2 are closely related to the contract  farming and what this relationship is all about;

7/ the conclusions explain too poorly the reasons why the proposed contract  farming model is supposed to be a guarantee of development coffee farms and what is the role of coffee  trees replanting in this process .

 

Under these circumstances, meeting the requirements for scientific work would require to create a new concept  of the article (in fact, this would mean writing a large part of the new text). The question remains whether the empirical material used by the author(s) is sufficient to conduct a valid scientific study. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Agriculture, through the supply of food products, is a very important sector of the economy. Unfortunately, it is exposed to numerous risks. The search for various tools to reduce them should be considered very valuable. One of them are cultivation contracts, considered by some to be beneficial forms of support for farmers, and quite the opposite by others, which is why I consider it very appropriate to take up the subject of contract farming.

 

The study requires corrections and explanations:

1. The article lists five main factors (lines: 15, 16 and 567-569) that need to be assessed: financing, farmers' competence, digitalization, quality of production and cooperation between actors. However, it is not known what role these factors play. What do these factors refer to? There is no indication that they can contribute to the development of contract farming.

2. The contract farming model was prepared on the basis of data collected during in-depth interviews with several informants. According to the article, there were three of them. It is suggested to indicate a specific number of informants with an indication of their competence to provide reliable information. Who were informants 1-3? Similarly, the research team interviewed several farmers (line 156 and 157). How many were there?

3. The data for the study was obtained, among others, from the raw data (rows 172-174). The way in which this method is explained is unreliable. Please describe what tools were used to carry out the observations, what issues the prepared questions for the interview concerned and how the questionnaires were distributed?

4. The conducted research does not allow to draw conclusions contained in line 574. How do you know that many farmers are cheating with the current KUR program (line 574)? There are also statements that are not supported by either own or literature research, e.g. in lines 589-591 and 601-602.

5. Lines 614 and 615 include the statement "Provision of gross period 614 facilities where farmers do not pay in the next period when they are already productive", which is incomprehensible.

 

6. Currency is missing for given values ​​(lines 49 and 390).

 

7. Please correct the font size in the words that begin the sentence, e.g. in lines: 248, 301, 335, 586.

 

8. Missing punctuation marks (no dots at the end of the dish) in lines: 279, 288, 299, 345, 496-498, 619 and in the table 2.

 

9. In line 282 there is the phrase: "the closed look" instead of "the closed loop". In line 592 the following is used twice: 1) - please correct.

  

No comments.

Reviewer 3 Report

Please find in the attach files some suggestions for improving your works.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf