Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Engagement with conservation tillage shaped by “good farmer” identity

Engagement with conservation tillage shaped by “good farmer” identity The “good farmer” literature, grounded in Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and capital, has provided researchers with a socio-cultural approach to understanding conservation adoption behavior. The good farmer literature suggests that conservation practices may not be widely accepted because they do not allow farmers to demonstrate symbols of good farming. This lens has not been applied to the adoption of conservation tillage (CT), a practice increasingly used to improve conservation outcomes, farming efficiency and crop productivity. Drawing from in-depth interviews (n = 28) with dryland wheat farmers in the US inland Pacific Northwest (iPNW), this research seeks to understand how farmers’ engagement with CT is shaped by identity as a good farmer. Some farmers also sought to bolster social capital through CT by maintaining and strengthening relationships with peers, landowners, and future generations. We further found that engagement with CT provided a link for some participants between productivist values and stewardship values within the good farming identity. The findings from this research may help contextualize the barriers and opportunities to the adoption of agricultural conservation practices within farmer-specific social, cultural, and economic forms of capital. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Agriculture and Human Values Springer Journals

Engagement with conservation tillage shaped by “good farmer” identity

Download PDF
11 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/engagement-with-conservation-tillage-shaped-by-good-farmer-identity-2wprHr6P10

References (61)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021
ISSN
0889-048X
eISSN
1572-8366
DOI
10.1007/s10460-021-10205-1
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The “good farmer” literature, grounded in Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and capital, has provided researchers with a socio-cultural approach to understanding conservation adoption behavior. The good farmer literature suggests that conservation practices may not be widely accepted because they do not allow farmers to demonstrate symbols of good farming. This lens has not been applied to the adoption of conservation tillage (CT), a practice increasingly used to improve conservation outcomes, farming efficiency and crop productivity. Drawing from in-depth interviews (n = 28) with dryland wheat farmers in the US inland Pacific Northwest (iPNW), this research seeks to understand how farmers’ engagement with CT is shaped by identity as a good farmer. Some farmers also sought to bolster social capital through CT by maintaining and strengthening relationships with peers, landowners, and future generations. We further found that engagement with CT provided a link for some participants between productivist values and stewardship values within the good farming identity. The findings from this research may help contextualize the barriers and opportunities to the adoption of agricultural conservation practices within farmer-specific social, cultural, and economic forms of capital.

Journal

Agriculture and Human Values – Springer Journals

Published: Dec 1, 2021

Keywords: Good farming; Conservation tillage; Agricultural conservation adoption; Productivist values; Stewardship values; Bourdieu

There are no references for this article.