An adoption spectrum for sustainable agriculture practices: A new framework applied to cover crop adoption

Abstract

CONTEXTThe adoption of sustainable agriculture practices is critical for future ecological, food security, and farmer livelihood goals. Traditionally, the adoption of sustainable agriculture practices is treated as a binary decision, which simplifies the known complexity around behavior change. Furthermore, this approach ignores farmers that have previously utilized a practice, the extent to which a farmer adopts a practice across their farm, as well as the complexity of different sustainable agriculture practices, which may evolve over time. OBJECTIVEThis analysis explores the complexity of farmer adoption of best management practices by developing a framework that considers adoption across multiple components and beyond a simple outcome. METHODSWe develop a new framework for the adoption of sustainable agriculture practices that proposes four key elements: Entirety, variability, sophistication, and longevity. We incorporate this framework into a latent class analysis, using data from a nationwide survey of U.S. row crop farmers' focused on cover crop adoption. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSWe identify five types of adopters, including non-adopters, previous adopters, conservative new adopters, innovative new adopters, and early adopters. This analysis challenges existing innovation theories, which typically indicate that early adopters are the primary innovators within an innovation system. Instead, we identify a class of new farmer adopters that have the highest adoption of innovative, sophisticated practices. Utilizing multinomial logit models, we further examine the factors that influence farmers' adoption classification. We find self-efficacy, perceived production risks, social-environmental altruism, communication and networking, other conservation practice use, diversity of cash crops, livestock operations and farming size have various effects on farmers' different adoption types. SIGNIFICANCEThe framework and its application for cover crop adoption provide a structured opportunity to further our understanding of sustainable agriculture practice adoption. Given our identification of five types of adopters, and their unique needs, interests, and propensity to adoption of varying levels, these results provide practical implications for successful farmer learning and extension services. In particular, we highlight that adoption may have multiple forms that should be considered in policy development and technical assistance, including not only “new” adoption, but also re-adoption, as well as continued and increasingly complex adoption of sustainable agriculture practices.