Abstract
The irrigated agriculture sector has been facing an increased scarcity of good quality water worldwide. Consequently, the sustainability of water intensive crops, such as avocado, is threatened when water becomes scarce and expensive, or when growers must use saline water supplies that reduce crop yields. A variety of irrigation technologies and water management practices are now recommended to help growers through times of limited water supplies and elevated salinity levels. To examine how growers adopt different practices and combinations of practices, we collected data from a sample of avocado growers in California. We used Kohonen self-organizing maps, and developed logit models to identify the most common bundles of technologies and management practices that growers are using to deal with water scarcity. We test the validity of the proposed bundles and factors affecting their adoption, using primary data obtained from a survey of California avocado growers at the height of the drought during 2012–2013. Results show that farm location, share of income from agricultural production, use of cooperative extension advice, and farmer characteristics, such as age and education, all play important roles in grower adoption of individual and bundled methods to adapt to water scarcity.
Highlights
Availability of good quality water for irrigated agriculture is significantly affected by climate change and increased urban and agricultural demands on fresh water supplies [1]
Based on the work reviewed in the previous section, we introduce two models to capture the behavioral relationship of choosing a bundle of irrigation technologies and water management practices in avocado production
We estimate a model where we look at adoption of either irrigation technology and/or management practices in a binary-choice framework as affected by a set of variables such as farm characteristics, farmer characteristics, informational variables, and fixed effects variables
Summary
Availability of good quality water for irrigated agriculture is significantly affected by climate change and increased urban and agricultural demands on fresh water supplies [1]. Farmers may respond to lower water availability and reduced quality (e.g., higher salinity) by introducing various water conservation technologies and management practices with short- and long-term implications [3]. Farmers may invest in changes to their irrigation technologies by installing soil water monitoring equipment, or constructing new wells and pipelines for use of alternative water sources, such as treated wastewater [4]. All of these responses can be undertaken by growers either separately or jointly, as bundles of responses. Adoption of bundles may provide growers more flexibility than adoption of individual technologies or management practices [5]
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