Farmers’ environmental awareness: Construct development, measurement, and use

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the empirical measurement of farmers’ environmental awareness, and improve the understanding of the role of environmental awareness in farmers’ adoption of cleaner agricultural practices. We provide a theoretical and methodological framework for measuring environmental awareness as a multi-dimensional concept. The data obtained from a survey of 382 farmers in northern Serbia are used as an empirical basis to test the developed latent environmental awareness construct. This construct includes several domains: environmental knowledge, biospheric concern, connectedness to nature, environmental attitudes, and environmental behavior. The results show that environmental knowledge contributes the most to explaining the environmental awareness construct (factor loading = 0.83), whereas biospheric concern contributes the least (factor loading = 0.23). Regarding agricultural practices, environmental awareness is higher among farmers who use biological pest control (+23%), mulching (+17%), and green manure (+9%). Thus, our results uncover the role of farmers’ environmental awareness in the adoption of more sustainable agricultural practices. These results document the operational validity of the construct and its potential use in research activities and management programs geared toward promoting environmentally friendly food production.