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

全球各地都存在水质挑战，其中许多问题与土地利用和土地管理决策有关，例如与城市发展径流和农业化肥使用有关的问题。这些问题在美国中西部已经成为最重要的问题，在那里，既要提高粮食生产，又要保护生态系统服务。在这片以农业为主的土地上做出的决定影响着五大湖和墨西哥湾下游的水质。农场保护措施是解决与农业生产有关的环境问题的一种方法。然而，使用这些做法需要农民在短期内接受一定程度的风险和不确定性，以实现长期的农场利益；气候变化和商品市场波动等因素进一步加剧了这一挑战。尽管有大量投资鼓励土地所有者使用自然保育，但在私人土地上采用自然保育措施的情况仍然相对较低，而且长期停滞不前。本论文旨在通过提出以下问题，通过稀缺性的理论框架，更好地理解在私有土地上从事保护实践的可能性：参与是否受到限制农民履行保护承诺能力的年度季节性周期的阻碍？尽管对农民保护决策进行了大量研究，但许多常用的预测因素解释力较低。此外，随着时间的推移，农民保护利用意愿往往较高，而实际保护行为往往较低，两者之间存在持续的差距。为了应对这些挑战，需要更广泛的视角，更明确地考虑农民做出决定的背景，并可能阻止善意的个人遵循这些意图。本研究项目通过评估财政和时间稀缺性在农民决策中的作用来填补这一空白。缺乏会导致认知功能下降，从而改变决策。本项目旨在确定财政或时间短缺是否是农民的一个突出问题，并评估短缺是否以不同的方式影响不同的农民群体。这项工作通过研究季节性稀缺对覆盖作物采用的影响，将稀缺与保护决策联系起来，这是一种特别危险、不确定和复杂的做法。研究小组招募农民一年三次参加访谈和认知任务，以了解他们对稀缺的体验以及他们对保护措施（例如覆盖作物）的使用和看法。假设是，拥有较大经营和非农收入的农民不太可能受到季节性短缺的影响，而那些经历季节性短缺的农民将不太可能使用覆盖作物。本研究深化了我们对私人土地保护决策的理论认识，同时通过将其应用于新的环境和新的行为，提高了我们对稀缺性的理解。重要的是，这项工作将当前的农民保护叙事从狭隘地关注个人层面的属性转变为更广泛地探索这些因素如何与环境层面的因素（包括稀缺性和农业的季节性）相互作用。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.