Diversification of consumers’ demand and environmental concerns are at the origin of a trend towards short marketing chains and towards direct links between consumers and farmers in developed countries. This paper explores farmers’ motivations for choosing these types of marketing chains and/or the “traditional” ones. To this purpose, a theoretical model of marketing chain choice is developed, and a multivariate probit model of organic farmers’ choice of the marketing chain is estimated from a unique data set of organic farms in an Italian region.