ABSTRACT:
Land owner-operators in the Darby Creek watershed located in central Ohio were provided the opportunity to participate in a comprehensive soil and water conservation program sponsored by several public and private conservation organizations. Extensive human and economic resources were appropriated by the cooperating organizations to implement a conservation effort that emphasized information, education, and cost-sharing to motivate land owner-operators to adopt soil and water protection practices at the farm level. Data were collected in 1991 prior to the implementation of the conservation program and again in 1994 after conservation efforts had been in operation for approximately 3 years. Analysis of longitudinal data revealed that conservation efforts were not very successful in motivating land owner-operators to change production practices. While significant modifications in production practices were observed over time, the changes were not uniformly desirable from the perspective of soil and water conservation. The findings also revealed that land owner-operators within the study area become more polarized in terms of the types of farm production systems employed. Such findings suggest that it may become more difficult to motivate land owner-operators who have resisted using conservation production systems in the past to adopt conservation production systems in the future. Study findings bring into serious question the utility of continuing to implement soil and water conservation practices using traditional voluntary approaches such as those used in the Darby Creek watershed.
Footnotes
Salary and research support that made this paper possible were provided by the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center of The Ohio State University. Financial support for data collection was provided by the Management Systems Evaluation Area project funded by the Cooperative Extension Service/USDA, the Agricultural Research Service/USDA, the Cooperative State Research Service/USDA, the Natural Resources Conservation Service/USDA, the United States Geologic Survey, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency. The positions advanced in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not represent official positions of the funding agencies.
- Copyright 1998 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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