Farmer decisions about adopting environmentally beneficial practices

Farmers hugely influence the mix of ecosystem services that rural landscapes provide. Their management choices about crop and livestock production practices affect services linked to water, soil, climate, and wild species. Apart from cropland and pastures, farmers also control woodlots, wetlands, and meadows that can keep groundwater clean, actively mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and provide habitat for beneficial insects (Power 2010, Swinton et al. 2007; Swinton et al. 2015, Chapter 3 in this volume). Given that farmers have such influence over rural ecosystems, it is important to ask how they decide whether and how much to adopt environmentally beneficial practices. These questions about farmer behavior take us inside the Social System section of the Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research (KBS LTER) conceptual model (Fig. 1.4 in Robertson and Hamilton 2015, Chapter 1 in this volume). The model shows that humans respond to flows of ecosystem services as well as to other drivers of change. Yet human behavior is tremendously variable, and farmers are no exception. Their individual objectives and how they experience external stimuli affect how they respond. For professional farmers, income generation is a major objective. They experience all sorts of ecosystem services, but they are in business to produce and sell provisioning services such as food, fiber, and bioenergy products. Incentives, rules, perceptions, personal values, and social norms (Chen et al. 2009) all shape how they manage agricultural ecosystems. In this chapter, we examine patterns in U.S. agriculture over the past century to understand how present-day patterns evolved. We then draw on research with crop farmers about their decisions to adopt agricultural practices that provide Swinton, S. M., N. Rector, G. P. Robertson, C. B. Jolejole-Foreman, and F. Lupi. 2015. Farmer decisions about adopting environmentally beneficial practices. Pages 340-359 in S. K. Hamilton, J. E. Doll, and G. P. Robertson, editors. The Ecology of Agricultural Landscapes: Long-Term Research on the Path to Sustainability. Oxford University Press, New York, New York, USA.