1 I was hired to do a jurisdiction review and literature review to - - PDF document

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I was hired to do a jurisdiction review and literature review to understand the process to BMP adoption and behavior. So particularly, what are the socio demographic and

• ther factors that contribute to BMP adoption and then looking particularly at what

motivates farmers and attitudinal factors. So the second objective of this jurisdictional scan or literature review is to really be able to understand how other places might have used segmentation and whether it has been successful. And finally, if we could find out lessons and messaging from other programs that could be brought forward into for OMAFRA programs. So the focus was on looking at adoption of climate mitigation as strategies on the farm and we looked at particularly eleven primarily soil health BMP’s and we were looking at cropping systems. So I was looking in particularly for anything that focused

• n soya beans and wheat because those are the primary crops in Ontario. And

fortunately, there’s a beautiful study that was just conducted I think out of Davis. And the person did a beautiful summary of all the different factors that have contributed to soil BMP adoption in the US. And so, Bruce has that paper and anybody can write him and he can provide a copy of it. It’s by Liz Carlisle and it just came out in 2016. 2

So when you review this literature it’s extensive, and so people focus on different factors and one; the first thing I thought of well the literature tells us there’s not really one set of factors that contributes they’re significant sometimes, sometimes a factor’s not significant. And overall, any literature review will tell you that you can’t pinpoint to sort of single things that motivate people. And one of the reasons is that there has never really been a really good framework for theoretical framework for understanding behaviourand looking at these factors. So we use this a reason action approach, and what it did is it allowed us to take all of these different variables to be assessed and put them in these different boxes. And so I just want to walk you through these boxes because I think when you’re talking about communication and engagement strategies, you’re gonnabe figuring out which of these boxes you want to focus on. So there’s a whole pile of background factors so the age of producer, demographics, income and all of that. And ah- but they really don’t help us understand what motivates the farmer to act. And so, then we wanted to bundle those things into ah behavioural beliefs, and normative beliefs, and controlled beliefs, and I’ll explain what each of those are. So behavioural beliefs are what do the farmers think about efficacy of the practice. A: is that practice actually going to lead to the environmental outcome envisioned. So if we’re talking about water quality, if you talk to farmer’s they’ll say: “my farm isn’t 3

gonna have an impact on lake Erie. So I shouldn’t do water”. So that’s efficacy of the environmental efficacy of the practice. But there could also be financial efficacy, so many practices benefit the farmer, but they might not know that that’s true, they might not believe that it’s true. So those two factors, the financial efficacy and the environmental efficacy are very important in the behavioural change. And then there’s the whole social construct around the practice, and so these are the normative beliefs how does practice fit within the community of farming? Is it seen as

• dd or weird that you’re undertaking this practice? If you are adopting, so I read one

study which was interesting from the University of Guelph, and some farmers reported when they were interviewed that they thought that other farmers that were adopting BMP’s were just being show-offs. So there’s this the whole kindanormative frame around adoption of practices or being an early adopter. And finally, there’s Control beliefs and these are capacity beliefs –so even if you believe that uh behavior led to environmental outcome, that was supposed to be achieved and it was financially beneficial, you might not have the capital access to change your behaviour. You might require additional extension and support or you might need access to specialized equipment, which was what was found in this review of adoption of soil BMP’s. So these are the 3 different compartments – you can start to think about by figuring out what is the barrier to adoption that’s facing the individuals that you are trying to target, and then develop your engagement strategies within those boxes. 3

Again we reviewed factors influencing adoption and as I told you the result - It

• depends. It’s context and locally specific factors that are important. In more than 70

reports we assessed, age, education, farm size, income, environment and climate (so primarily rainfall), technical assistance, and participation in previous components. Those all tended to be the most significant variables, they weren’t always significant and things like age can work into two different directions. So young farmers might be motivated to adopt new practices for completely different reasons than an older

• farmer. Older farmers might know more about their land, or be more willing to take

risks because they are near the end of their careers. So all sorts of reasons and some inconsistency in how these variables are treated. The second interesting thing is that in nearly all cases, profitability was not the most important factor for adoption of practice. Now I’m gonna say that with a grain of salt, because there’s not wide spread of adoption of many BMP’s, and they’re on a cost share basis. So obviously when farmers are undertaking some of them merits of cost to them, and a there probably could be more uptake if there were financial

• incentives. And we know from the economics literature that financial incentives are
• important. So the upshot of this is that without if everything is in place, the practices,

efficacious from an environmental and financial perspective, if the farmer is not motivated, the practice won’t happen. And so we really want to focus in on these normative factors and the social context through the farming. 4

In terms of Ontario this is just like a very quick summary of the factors that we found in studies here are environmental and financial efficacy were important reasons why farmers participated in the environmental farm plan program, personal benefit was a reason why farmers were willing to participate in the water quality program- forget the exact name of it, the conservation programs- conservation authority programs. Umm important motivation in the study from Guelph which looked at social context and factors, is farmers really were interested in not only in the financial benefits but what were the health benefits to the land, and the animals, and people. So this goes back to some of the styles that might be important. Ethical attitude towards the environment is important but only for a small segment of farmers, Social networks and trust as it turned out didn’t turn out to be significant in any of the studies that we looked at. And so what I think it’s they just weren’t described in a granular enough fashion to pick up some of the differences. Another thing that we think- well your neighbouris doing a practice, and uh they’re early adopter that thought the practice would diffuse through the community. There’s no evidence of proximity or that following what your neighbours do is how farmers

• behave. And so I thought that was also quite interesting, that’s actually one of the

reasons I think that it’s important to look through the segmentation literature because the adoption diffusion model has basically not stood the test of time. 5

We reviewed motivations for participations in sixteen programs in US, Australia, Canada, and one in Europe. Most farmers participated in water quality programs to avoid regulation. The prominence of environmental sensitivity areas on your land would also increase your adoption because you’re worried about the public perceptions of how you’re managing those lands. And the funding was finally another important reason so you participate in a program in order to access cost share dollars. The main barriers to participation and this came out loud and clearly in environmental farm plan reviews as well is that time commitment and paperwork drives farmers away, lack of cost-share funding or adequate funding for some of the BMP’s, so for extensive BMPS’s some cost share programs might only cover 10- 20%. So it’s simply not of interest to the farmer. Approval times, again, if you start your paperwork and it takes you months to get an approval for the cost share program it becomes not worthy your effort. Lack of understanding of the profitability of the practice is important, it speaks for the need

• f experimental sites where farmers can see demonstrated benefits. And then this

whole lack of trust in government and problems around confidentiality. So there’s still a perception that farmers can be sued for some of their practices and that there is a liability to participating in a farm plan. and I think that’s quite interesting because a 6

lot the literature argues well that’s simply not true, but I’m not sure it’s not true because I don’t think there’s been a court case where it’s been tested. So I think that concern is valid and I think that it will continue to prohibit participation in certain kinds of programs. 6

Alright so, what did the programs do primarily? They increased awareness of environmental issues and BMPs, almost all programs on the ground didn’t monitor

• utcomes, and this is a problem from the farmer’s perspective because they’re not

learning about whether their BMP’s contribute, so they actually you know have less incentive to keep them on the ground as the price of corn goes up so that’s

• important. Farmers reported positive benefits so what’s interesting here is these are

the things farmers notice from doing the BMP: increased efficiency of on farm

• utputs, improvements in soil health, water quality. So these are all the

environmental efficacy things that I was talking about in that first box, and it turns out those are really important motivators for farmers, they care about the health of their land in many cases more than the profitability of the land. And so finding projects that demonstrate that will be key to good engagement. The importance of long term continuous financial support, that seemed to be critical. And then Successful extensions elements include workshops and educational components combined with peer led experimentation. So the land care program in Australia brings farmers together and as peers they decide what practices they want to experiment with, they come up with the experiment, and then test them out on their own farms and use them as case studies. Q: Going back to the second bullet, can you explain more fully the continuous long term financial support, did you mean ongoing support for a particular BMP that might 7

require cost overtime? Marian: Yes Q: Or was it the fact that we have short term cost share type programs in place rather than something that’s personal growth? Marian: So it’s both- so it’s if you need like for operation practices where you need annual payments, the concern that the program is there in place for 3 years you don’t know what’s going to happen to the next round of growing forward. You know why bother undertaking the capitol cost to change your practice. And for some of these like cover cropping it could involve big up-front costs and longer payoff times. Q: Okay, thanks. 7

Now I want to talk about this is idea of segmentation of the market. So this idea of farming styles being important comes primarily out of Europe. In the 1950’s a French philosopher went down from France and tried to work with farmers in Algeria, and low and behold they weren’t interested in adopting all of the nice science methods that were developed out of Paris. And it was really not because the practice didn’t work, but because it was the way people worked that their social norms were not consistent with how they were delivering the practice. So he came up with this whole idea, he called it habitus, it’s this idea that people have this mental model of the right way to do farming to practice. And so in the 1990’s then, the Netherlands started to look at farmer segmentation as a way to get manure management under control. And these started this area of research so they talk about agriculture as a subculture and then there’s different subcultures within that

• culture. And the most important, out of all the factors we reviewed, they started out

as technocratic farmers they wanting to maximize productivity, super efficient. And then we have the traditional farmers who are not really as integrated into market, and they’re more isolated. So that was the very first axis that people started looking at, and then they started adding things, so what stage of life are you in? Are you ready to pass on the farm? Then that means you might have a different idea of what you should be doing with your practices vs. somebody who is just starting out

• r has no children. So there’s the adoption of technology, the relationship to markets,

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whether you’re local or productivist, highly entrepreneurial farms, is sense of place and craftsmanship important? Craftsmanship is interesting because the things that seem to matter were the health

• f the animals, so that’s a strong motivator for farms, and also the health of the farm

in terms of water quality. Environmental attitude, were they strong environmentally motivated or not. And that we know that there’s segmentation, we’ve done studies in Alberta that show the same thing. Is farming you primary source of income or your secondary source of income? And are you an isolated farmer, you know just kinda a recluse that has all their trucks all over the yard or is your farm a big enterprise and very connected. Q: General speaking is the primary more motivated than the secondary? Marian: Not necessarily. Q: interesting. Marian: For different reasons. I’ll give you some examples from Europe and then we can talk about what I think are the factors in Ontario are that are significant. 8

DEFRA from UK adopted a farmer segmentation model to guide its official program planning they were delivering, and they developed five different styles of farming. So the first style is the custodian, and you’ll notice for these first two groups: custodian and life style choice, farming’s a way of life, they have pride in the land. The connection for these farmers in their motivation is emotional. And so these are the messages you want to give to these folks. So with the lifestyle choice it’s not the main source of income, but they want to take care of the land, they want to be on the land. And so, again these are the specific motivations. Then you have the large segment of the population they’re just pragmatic, so they don’t care about maximizing efficiency, they might not be doing precision farming walking and around with GPS, but they sort of weigh the costs and benefits for doing different approaches, and they’re pragmatic. Then these next two groups: modern family business that’s the really super efficient farm, they do financial planning and use new tools, and then this challenged enterprise group, this is the last group. And they’re sort of the ones I was referring to the “isolated group”, very hard to reach out to, reclusive, and the narrative around this summary of these categories is that these are the folks who got stuck with the farm and they can’t get out of it. So interestingly, they thought the best way to engage with this group of farmers was through their kids in the classroom and through their wives. Because they’re not networked they’re just- they couldn’t care 9

less about farming. Within this continuum then you have these two different approaches to engagement. On the pragmatic in the commercial enterprise farmers which aren’t a very hard group to get at, they’re interested in the financial efficacy of practice and the financial cash compliments to change their practice. On the lifestyle choice and the custodian again I these two groups you can motivate them because environmental stewardship is good. Again, depending on how you sort your segments for Ontario, you’re gonna engage different group with different messages. 9

This afternoon you’re gonna take these six categories which again came from some background work in the UK. Again you have the older traditional style, and what their style is characterized by is poor knowledge of impacts, they use traditional technologies, low economic capacity, they don’t have a lot of capitol or access to it, and they might rely on farm income to

• supplement. The Information channels you would want to engage with them on are

family, other farmers, and their social networks. So primarily the church, and I know that in some of the studies that I saw from Ontario, the church was actually an important place where farmers meet each other and talk about stuff. The recommended approach for these guys is peer to peer learning, local organizations with farmers in the community. Then we got these older innovators, they’re early adopters and experimenters, they have a passion for farming, they understand their land, and they know how to apply new practices so this goes to your question why we have this disparity between old and young. And for these guys demonstration farms they’re great to use for that they like to try new stuff. The third category is young innovators and these are young family farmers, the reason they’re innovative is they don’t have mental model in their head of “we should do things the way it’s always been done”. And so they’re open to change and 10

restructuring and trying new stuff, they’ve got a lot of time to repay back all those costs and so these are willing to participate in advisory groups and motivate other people. 10

Then we have our big Agri-business category, and this would be similar to I think some of the farm styles in south west Ontario. Large farms, low margins, high intensity production, they’re very aware of policy, worried about its impacts and proactive, engaging in networks too, proactively addressed that. They have a professional attitude, they want to grow, they are into technologies that optimize things you’re doing on the land, they’re information channels are through these agronomic advisory communities, they’re not necessarily going to be the advisors though, they’re busy. They often have their own advisors that they hire, and so you work with these folks through their industry channels and their consultants that go to their farms. Then we have the reclusive farmer and again these are the involuntary, their marginal profitability, low motivation, work with them through the family, the kids. And the part-time farmers who make a life style choice, they’re are often unaware of policies, but sometimes they’re environmentally motivated, they’re not really engaged in any of the traditional agricultural information channels. And they need help just finding out where information is, and with them you want to build awareness. 11

Ok so to go for the findings and terms of segmentation for Ontario, what you don’t want to do is treat all of these adoption categories the same way. So we have people who are already adopting, and for them the problem is, they think they’re already doing enough. And they don’t think adopting additional practices is going to lead to environmental improvements, so the environmentally efficacy thing on water quality and environmental change particularly- it’s going to be a big challenge on getting good messages there. You want to focus on increasing awareness of efficacy of that

• practice. So if there’s ten more soil BMP’s that they can do and they’re doing three,

show how they’re profitable demonstration farms. For the potential adopters these folks are already motivated, they have some capacity

• barriers. So maybe they need some extension, they need a farmer to go out to their

farm and work with them. Or they might have capitol barriers or cover cropping access to specialized equipment is expensive, it’s a barrier. So there could be co-ops to share the equipment, stuff like that. So of both these are target groups that are going to change their practices in the short run. They either want to see better demonstration benefits or they need additional extension, maybe some loans, things like that. You’re gonna get the most results from these guys. The non adopters is the hard group to figure out because you have to motivate them. You’re gonna have to motivate them either by working through farming network so whether it’s the fertilizer supply companies, who brings them seeds, and sort of start 12

to change the technology so that they become motivated to adopt practices. \ Targeted outreach to particular groups based on factors. So for the Ontario study these are the factors we found significant: if you’re a renter, you have a whole different idea of how fast the profitability of the practice needs to turn around. So renters are much more likely to adopt no till than changes in cover crops, because those take a ten year maturation time. And so, there’s some recommendations on how you can treat renters as shareholders instead of just renters, so maybe changing the landlord relationship with them can help. Structural vs operational BMP’s, operational ones are easy, short-ones, structural

• nes are going to be harder to target. Little evidence of regional differences in

adoption of practices in across Ontario but I would say there’s not really any studies, three or four maybe looked at that variable. The cultural influences one was interesting. So new immigrants don’t have that baggage of how we do farming in Ontario, and a lot of them come from Europe where they have highly regulated programs. They’re more open to some of these water quality and climate change practices than perhaps traditional farmers in Ontario and Canada. So that’s a group that you can think about targeting. EFP has been quite successful in working with the Mennonites and Francophone communities so I think that something that can also be built on, and First Nations. So look at what’s working in those cases. And finally, in terms further research on farm styles, there was a clear relationship between size of farm and adoption of practices and the big farms tend to be in the north where the farms aren’t that profitable. In south west where you also have very big enterprises, but there’s high profitable farms, I think the opportunity cost is just very high, and you’re gonna have to find a different way to deal with that group. Again, maybe working through the whole farm marketing system to try to reach

• them. The thing with them is that they just do not have time. They don’t have time

for your message. You have to get your message through to them some other way. And cultural components again the church seemed to be a good opportunity for networking between farmers. 12

The messages in framing is also important, so a key message from the literature is do not focus on climate change as the message. There’s a lot of people who do not believe in agrogenicclimate change, or there’s just nothing that can be done about it. So there’s a feeling of hopelessness, it’s a bad message. Focus on efficacy of the benefits because we want to motivate these farmers to do

• more. And focus on positive rather than negative messages so this is what will be

gained and not you should do this because water pollution is harmful. I’m sure this is all straight forwards to you guys. Surprise resources will increase your persuasiveness. So if you can get crop association to work with you than passing on the messages, that’s going to be more effective than coming from a steward association. Make sure that their recommendations are very specific, so this is in terms of the extension, make sure that it’s tailored to the specific practice in Ontario for some things like cover cropping, there might be some additional sort of experimentation with different varieties and stuff that need to take place. The reason for cover cropping why the marketing system is really important to target, is that the timing of sales of the crop is really important barrier to adopting these practices. And so you have to sort of work within the whole market structure to get cover crop that BMP’s adopted. So I just want to speak for a second to the symbolic capital, so those are the 13

segmentation pieces. So the farmers that care about the health of their animals, you target that when you’re talking to that specific group. So the challenge for Ontario is gonna be how do we figure out how these different farm types, what is their symbolic capital? And I recommended that some future research be done on that. 13

In terms of tech transferring, extension, one-to-one peer led, aversion to top down all

• bvious, but the peer led experimentation lead to the - seemed to be an important

factor, they have these programs now in Scotland, in Ireland, in Australia where they have moderator farms where the experiment just becomes this long term experiment and that’s very good for I think changing practices. It’s important that the farmers decide what those experiments are, and it’s not driven by OSIA through environmental farm plan. Again make sure that you find opportunities to bring farmers together where farmers have weak ties. So I think environmental farm plan is a great experience for farmers because they get to meet other farmers, they’re in a same community and they learn new ideas. The research shows that people learn the most and are willing to try new things when they meet somebody they haven’t met before, and they learn about a new practice, so it turns out that the information channels, you don’t sort of do what your neighbour’sdoing that’s why would you want to do that. But if you meet somebody for the first time that tells you about a cool practice, that’s the opportunity. And that’s why EFP is very powerful. One important point on the last slide, a number of studies complained about the lack

• f OMAFRA extensionists, so they were seen as the most trusted, they didn’t have

any sort of skin in a different game, and there was lack of trust in some of these large farm organizations, which some of the quotes would say things like: “they’re just political organizations, now and they’re working too closely with the government policy people”. And so they like OSIA and they like the government extensionists. 14

Okay so I’m just gonna go very fast through these key findings and recommendations. There needs to be more R&D on complex BMPs I already talked about. They need to do a bit more technical feasibility of doing cover cropping and proper rotation in the specific Ontario landscape, so you can’t necessarily take what’s going on in Iowa and move it up here. 15

We recommended more research on farm styles and to develop the segmentation framework like the UK example. Particularly looking for styles with low participation rates and then figure out how to attach BMPs to their cultural capital. The label of styles is not as important as the strategies to reach these low participation of folks, but because there’s a large number of low- no participation, I think it’s around 60%? So what is the participation of EFP and BMP’s in Ontario? It’s around 60% right? Hifgherre than that? (discussion with audience) Audience: There are two different stories on that one is high and one is a third.. Audience: Over time there’s a 70% of uptake grade of BMP and 30% or a third of the farmers have activated.. Marian: Right, and those are gonna be on the practices they self identify as being willing to do. So there’s probably a whole bunch of other practices that they could do,

• r they’re not aware of or not willing to do, so that needs to be teased out a little bit.

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Support the newly created cover crop working group and strategy. And I was sent this strategy last week and it has every single one of my recommendations in this strategy except for this using the segmentation approach. So I think it’s a really great

• pportunity to apply what’s in these recommendations and test it out with this

strategy. Additional extension to encourage farmers to implement soil health practices would include tours and other environmental practices used on other farms, these are actually recommendations that come out of the EFP review, one on one farm visits, with technical specialists, on farm demonstrations with specific practices, and discussions with other farmers on how to implement. 17

What I wanted to recommend then was to build on the EFP, I don’t know where it’s going in Ontario, but right now that would be great infrastructure to experiment programs from. And so build on its strengths, it’s province wide, farmers seem relatively happy with it but they want something more, they’re saying they want something more out of it. They come to one or two workshops already, so what’s going to be the next stage for EFP? Farmers are concerned about conflicting funding requirements for did programs, so if all of those programs were related to EFP instead

• f the growing forward that would be cool. Leveraging those multiple programs

could make it more beneficial for the farmer to do different practices if they’re aware now it links to all these farming opportunities. It enhances social interactions, so what I think could be done, in the EFP workshops, facilitate this idea of peer to peer

• experimentation. So the workshop outcome itself would be farmers coming up with

experiments that they’re willing to trial on your farms, and when they have their next workshop they can revisit their results. And so I think it’s a great opportunity to maintain the EFP and to grow it into a stronger platform. And then finding experimental peer to peer framework. 18

So I basically covered all of this but using EFP workshops to facilitate these sub committees, for different groups of practices or types of practices, then it’s a bottom up, you have a collective risk taking between farmers and I think that’s good too, you can try different things on different farms, and see how it’s working instead of one farm just being the plot for everything. And I’ve gone to experimental sites on some farms where the thing they tried was just not right for that microsite, but not necessarily not right for that sub watershed. And so it’s really good to have a collection of farms doing this. 19

These were the recommendations that were in the crop strategies. The conclusion is that the biggest barrier to getting farmers to adopt best management practices is “I don’t care”. They’re too busy, which means you have to really find ways to target your messages to reach them. Predicting adoption is a lot different than motivating. There are no good to models about how to motivate farmers this whole segmentation approach was an attempt to try to do that, and I can tell you that the DEFRA model, they tested it on their climate mitigation adoption of BMPS’s and they found that the segments were insignificant. That’s probably not encouraging but that’s doesn’t mean you wouldn’t take that approach at least to try to learn from different engagement approaches that work. Audience: I just thought it might be worthy to add that the comment you made earlier that climate change doesn’t resonate with people, so that’s not really a true test of the potential effectiveness? M: That’s right. I actually think that there’s a lot of benefits to segmentation and again, when you’ve already adopted the practice, it doesn’t mean that you’re getting at the segmentation pieces what’s farmers aren’t adopting. So again it’s this whole idea of we don’t what’s not motivating farmers and we need to learn that. So I still think it’s a very valuable strategy. 20

And finally removing barriers to programs is the biggest low hanging fruit. So if it’s funding to get your adopters to adopt more, or if it’s demonstrating the benefit of the practice, then it’s going to have an impact on water quality and Lake Erie, then I think that’s important. So in this case, the efficacy of the practice can be demonstrated through modelling. This is how many farms we would collectively need to uptake the practice, send those messages out to your producers, if you could get the sub water shed that market’s its products as: contributing to water quality these are all things that people are trying to play around with in different jurisdictions. Thank you very much for having me, I’d be happy to answer any questions. 20

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