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Agriculture continues to be a major contributor to water pollution, climate change and loss of biodiversity although policies to encourage farmers to work to higher sustainability standards in food and energy crop production have increased throughout the European Union. In New Member States, accession to the European Union mostly brought a substantially increased public support to foster the diffusion of certified organic farming. However, the take-up of organic farming is varied for reasons that are not yet well understood. In this paper, we analyse the diffusion of organic farming through farm populations. This involves an understanding of farmer behaviour and how it can change over time. We present a generic agent based model that builds on the Theory of Planned Behaviour as framework for understanding and modelling farmers' decision-making processes. The model is applied to high-diffusion regions in …