Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Farmer Decisions about
Adopting Environmentally
Beneicial Practices
Scott M. Swinton, Natalie Rector,
G. Philip Robertson, Christina B. Jolejole-Foreman,
and Frank Lupi
Farmers hugely influence the mix of ecosystem services that rural landscapes pro-
vide. Their management choices about crop and livestock production practices
affect services linked to water, soil, climate, and wild species. Apart from cropland
and pastures, farmers also control woodlots, wetlands, and meadows that can keep
groundwater clean, actively mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and pro-
vide habitat for beneficial insects (Power 2010, Swinton et al. 2007; Swinton et al.
2015, Chapter 3 in this volume). Given that farmers have such influence over rural
ecosystems, it is important to ask how they decide whether and how much to adopt
environmentally beneficial practices.
These questions about farmer behavior take us inside the Social System sec-
tion of the Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research (KBS
LTER) conceptual model (Fig. 1.4 in Robertson and Hamilton 2015, Chapter 1 in
this volume). The model shows that humans respond to flows of ecosystem ser-
vices as well as to other drivers of change. Yet human behavior is tremendously
variable, and farmers are no exception. Their individual objectives and how they
experience external stimuli affect how they respond. For professional farmers,
income generation is a major objective. They experience all sorts of ecosystem
services, but they are in business to produce and sell provisioning services such
as food, fiber, and bioenergy products. Incentives, rules, perceptions, personal
values, and social norms (Chen et al. 2009) all shape how they manage agricul-
tural ecosystems.
In this chapter, we examine patterns in U.S. agriculture over the past century
to understand how present-day patterns evolved. We then draw on research with
crop farmers about their decisions to adopt agricultural practices that provide
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