Incentivizing Conservation: Understanding Opportunities and Barriers That Influence Iowa Farmers’ Decisions to Adopt Nutrient Management Conservation Practices Over Time

Issue

Conservation practices such as cover crops can significantly reduce soil erosion, improve soil health, and reduce nutrient runoff and leaching on Iowa’s agricultural lands. While the promotion of voluntary adoption of such practices has been the main focus of policies and initiatives, such as the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy (INRS), adoption rates by farmers remain well below levels needed to make significant environmental improvements at scale.

Recent research has explored farmer conservation adoption as a dynamic process, examining farmers’ shifts between intention to adopt a practice, adoption, and continuance or discontinuance over time. Preliminary results show significant movement between categories, including a large number of farmers discontinuing a practice after previously having adopted it. These results indicate that progress toward nutrient management conservation goals in the state would be significantly higher had these farmers continued using these practices rather than discontinuing them.

Objective

This research project aims to fill important gaps in our understanding of complex farmer adoption behavior over time. Survey data from the Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll (IFRLP), a long-term panel survey of Iowa farmers, will be used to identify farmers who have moved between four different categories of adoption behavior related to cover crop use: a) openness to adoption, b) intention to adopt, c) adoption and d) non-adoption.

Approach

This study will focus on continuance/discontinuance by conducting in-depth interviews with farmers who have initially adopted cover crops and either continued this practice over time or have moved to another category of non-adoption (discontinuance). These interviews will identify factors that influence farmers to either continue or discontinue conservation practices. Results will provide much-needed information about why farmers transition to non-adoption after previously adopting a practice, which will inform the development of policies and outreach for encouraging farmers to maintain practices over time.