Abstract

Ecological sustainability practices have become central to debates on agricultural systems and climate resilience, yet evidence on their short-term economic implications for small-and medium-scale producers remains fragmented. This question is consequential because household livelihood security hinges on income cycles that rarely align with the temporal horizons of ecological processes. Existing research emphasizes the agronomic and environmental benefits of sustainable practices, but offers limited insight into how operational and systemic interventions are associated with income outcomes under heterogeneous production and market structures. This study examines whether ecological sustainability practices are associated with short-term income positioning within agricultural systems and how these associations vary across practices with distinct ecological functions. Using microdata from 57,439 agricultural units in the 2021 Chilean Agricultural Census, this study estimates a generalized partial proportional-odds model that preserves the ordinal structure of income while capturing threshold-specific effects. The results reveal consistent upward associations between operational practices and higher income categories. Organic fertilizers, organic matter, and erosion control increase the probability of belonging to the highest income category by 4.8, 2.4, and 1.5 percentage points, respectively. By contrast, conservation areas reduce that probability by 1.7 percent points, while reforestation lowers the probability of belonging to the upper-middle income category by 3.7 percent points. Structural activities and market channels exert substantially stronger effects: agro-industrial commercialization increases the probability of reaching the highest income category by 15 percentage points. These findings show that ecological sustainability practices are associated with differentiated economic pathways and clarify the conditions under which they align with or strain short-term livelihood dynamics.