Abstract
AbstractLittle research has been conducted on how agricultural producers in the northeastern United States conceptualize climate-related risk and how these farmers address risk through on-farm management strategies. Two years following Tropical Storm Irene, our team interviewed 15 farmers in order to investigate their perceptions of climate-related risk and how their decision-making was influenced by these perceptions. Our results show that Vermont farmers are concerned with both ecological and economic risk. Subthemes that emerged included geographic, topographic, and hydrological characteristics of farm sites; stability of land tenure; hydrological erosion; pest and disease pressure; market access; household financial stability; and floods. Farmers in our study believed that these risks are not new but that they are significantly intensified by climate change. Farmer responses were heavily focused on adaptation activities, with discussion of climate change mitigation activities notably absent. Psychological distance construal theory and hyperbolic discounting emerged as well-suited frames to explain why farmers reported adaptation activities but not mitigation strategies. Farmers will probably experience an increasing severity of climate-related impacts in the northeast region; therefore, information about climate-related risks coming from farmers’ personal experience should be integrated with forecasting data to help farmers plan effective adaptation strategies.
Highlights
Received: October 19, 2015 Accepted: September 9, 2016 Published: October 12, 2016This paper addresses how agricultural risks are conceptualized in an era of climate change, by farmers in the state of Vermont, in the northeastern United States
Our results show that Vermont farmers are concerned with both ecological and economic risk
Farmers who indicated in their survey response that they were willing to be contacted were approached to participate in the interviews only if their gross agricultural income was equal to or greater than $10,000 in 2011, and they practiced at least one best management practice (BMP) appropriate for later stages of investigation by researchers on the VAR team: no-till cultivation, cover cropping, storm water runoff management, rotational grazing, and conservation buffers
Summary
This paper addresses how agricultural risks are conceptualized in an era of climate change, by farmers in the state of Vermont, in the northeastern United States. The state of Vermont is located in the northeast region of the United States It is a rural state with an increasing percentage of its population living outside of urban areas (USDA-ERS, 2016), and an agricultural tradition dating back to European colonization in the 1700s (Albers, 2002). Farmer perceptions of climate change risk in Vermont Table 1. Population descriptive statistics for Vermont and the United States (USDA-ERS, 2016). The majority of Vermont principal operators have reported farming as their primary occupation, though the most recent USDA Census of Agriculture shows that half of Vermont farmers report a primary occupation other than farming (USDA-NASS, 2012)
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