Understanding farmer adoption of agricultural best management practices

Excerpt

In an ideal world, we would have a complete understanding about what motivates farmers to adopt best management practices (BMPs). With this knowledge in hand, conservation promoters and educators could deliver the perfect set of incentives and messages to each individual producer. If we knew that certain farmers would never be interested in adopting practices, we would not waste scarce time and resources on these individuals but could focus our energy on more amenable farmers. For over 25 years, researchers have been trying to address this complex issue. Unfortunately, human behavior is difficult to predict, and even when studies ask similar questions, they often find different answers.

In an attempt to understand the complete state of our knowledge about farmer adoption, we conducted a meta-analysis of all the relevant literature in the United States. We included all studies that presented some sort of statistical analysis with conclusions about the significance (or insignificance) of the relationship between independent variables and the dependent variable, BMP adoption. A total of 55 articles met our criteria. As studies often include very similar variables and test similar hypotheses, we were able to organize the independent variables into summary categories of capacity, awareness, attitudes, and farm …