A farm systems approach to the adoption of sustainable nitrogen management practices in California

Jessica Rudnick,Stephanie Tatge,Liza Wood,Mark Lubell,Molly Sears,Patrick H Brown,Sat Darshan S Khalsa

doi:10.1007/s10460-021-10190-5

Abstract

Improving nitrogen (N) fertilizer management in agricultural systems is critical to meeting environmental goals while maintaining economically viable and productive food systems. This paper applies a farm systems framework to analyze how adoption of N management practices is related to different farming operation characteristics and the extent to which fertilizer, soil and irrigation practices are related to each other. We develop a multivariate probit regression model to analyze the interdependency of these adoption behaviors from 966 farmers across three watersheds and diverse cropping systems in the Central Valley of California. Our analysis demonstrates that farmers adopt varying combinations or portfolios of practices, with the most common portfolio featuring a core set of fertilizer-focused practices. Irrigation infrastructure is an especially important farm operation characteristic for encouraging adoption of innovative practice portfolios that integrate water and fertilizer management. These findings highlight the ability for a farm systems approach to improve our understanding of farmer decision-making across diverse agricultural landscapes.

Highlights

Nitrogen (N) fertilizers are a dominant input in industrialized agricultural systems, significantly enhancing crop growth and yields, while generating one of the most challenging sources of current environmental pollution (Good and Beatty 2011; Osmond et al 2015; Kanter et al 2020)
This paper aims to reconcile this gap by applying a farm systems framework to evaluate farmers’ adoption of a suite of N management practices, paying careful attention to both the interdependency between individual management practices and how practice portfolios vary across farm types
To evaluate how adoption decisions are interrelated across practices (H1), we present the multivariate probit (MVP) model error correlation matrix and practice co-occurrence matrix, as well as the Quadratic Assignment Procedure (QAP) correlation between the two measures

Summary

Introduction

Nitrogen (N) fertilizers are a dominant input in industrialized agricultural systems, significantly enhancing crop growth and yields, while generating one of the most challenging sources of current environmental pollution (Good and Beatty 2011; Osmond et al 2015; Kanter et al 2020). While agricultural research and extension has devoted significant attention to developing farm management strategies for improving N use efficiency (NUE), understanding the factors influencing farmers’ adoption of these practices remains an active area of agricultural social science research (Reimer et al 2017). A growing body of ecological modelling research suggests that it will be necessary in most circumstances to simultaneously implement multiple best management practices, in order to see the desired improvements in ecological and social outcomes (Bosch et al 2013; Teshager et al 2017; McLellan et al 2018). Management practices across a farm are interdependent and it is important to analyze the mix or portfolio of practices farmers use to meet their management goals. Research must move beyond analyzing only a single practice at a time or counting multiple practices in ways that do not account for interdependencies

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