Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Evaluating the Effects of Financial and Temporal Scarcity on Farmer Decisions to Engage in Conservation

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Water quality challenges exist across the globe, with many of these issues tied to land use and land management decisions, such as those related to runoff from urban development and fertilizer use in agriculture. These issues have come to the forefront in the Midwestern United States where there is a tension to both enhance food production and protect ecosystem services. Decisions across this largely agricultural landscape influence downstream water quality in both the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. On-farm conservation practices are one way to combat the environmental issues associated with agricultural production. However, using these practices involves a farmer accepting some level of risk and uncertainty in the short-term to achieve long-term on-farm benefits; a challenge that is further exacerbated by factors like climate change and commodity market fluctuations. Despite large investments to encourage landowner conservation use, adoption of conservation practices on private lands remains relatively low and stagnant over time. This dissertation research seeks to better understand the likelihood of engaging in conservation practices on private lands through the theoretical framework of scarcity by asking the question: Is engagement hindered by annual seasonal cycles that limit a farmer’s ability to follow through on commitments to conservation?Despite substantial research examining farmer conservation decision-making, many commonly examined predictors have low explanatory power. Moreover, there is a continued gap between farmer conservation use intentions, which tend to be high, and actual conservation behavior over time, which tends to be low. In response to these challenges, there is a need for a broader perspective that more explicitly considers the context in which farmer decisions are made, and may prevent a well-intentioned individual from following through on those intentions. This research project fills this gap by assessing the role of financial and temporal scarcity in farmer decision making. Scarcity can cause a reduction in cognitive function that leads to altered decision making. This project seeks to determine if financial or temporal scarcity is a salient issue for farmers and to evaluate if scarcity impacts distinct groups of farmers in different ways. The work connects scarcity to conservation decisions by examining the effect of seasonal scarcity on cover crop adoption, a particularly risky, uncertain, and complex practice. The research team recruits farmers to participate in interviews and a cognitive task at three times throughout the year to understand their experience of scarcity and their use and perceptions of conservation practices (e.g., cover crops). Hypotheses are that farmers with larger operations and off-farm income are less likely to be impacted by seasonal scarcity and that those farmers experiencing seasonal scarcity will be less likely to use cover crops. The research advances our theoretical understanding of conservation decision making on private lands, while improving our understanding of scarcity by applying it in a new setting and with a new behavior. Importantly, this work shifts the current farmer conservation narrative away from a narrow focus on personal-level attributes to a broader exploration of how such factors may interact with contextual-level factors including scarcity and the seasonality of agriculture.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.