Overcoming impediments to adoption of crop residue management techniques will be crucial to implementation of conservation compliance plans
Excerpt
ANSWERING the question of why farmers adopt production technologies is elementary and apparent; new production technologies are adopted when the techniques are perceived as being in farmers' best interests. Almost everyone, farmers included, would agree with this basic premise. Yet disagreements arise when asking the more interesting and challenging question: Why don't farmers adopt new techniques, such as residue management systems?.
While disagreements exist, it is the answer to this latter question from which strategies must be built to help farmers make decisions that are economically, agronomically, and environmentally sound. Consequently, answers to the question of why farmers don't adopt must serve as the basis for increasing adoption. Efforts to increase the rate of adoption of residue management systems must be based on understanding why farmers reject new production techniques.
Reasons for nonadoption
Farmers do not adopt production technologies for two basic reasons: they are either unable or unwilling. These reasons are not mutually exclusive. Farmers can be able yet unwilling, willing but unable, and, of course, both unwilling and unable. These may sound like minor semantical distinctions, but the difference between a farmer being unwilling or unable is crucial when designing the appropriate remedial …
Footnotes
Pete Nowak is a professor in the Department of Rural Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 53706.
- Copyright 1992 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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