Farmers market; Credit: Lisa Wainger, UMCES-CBL
Authors: Dan Read, Lisa Wainger and Alexandra Carroll
Other contributors: Matt Royer, Matt Ehrhart, Lamonte Garber, Nancy Nunn, Anil Kumar Chaudhary, and Kate Everts
What is the issue?
Farmers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed play a crucial role in providing food and protecting water quality. However, despite having some of the highest rates of adoption of some best management practices (BMPs) in the country, agricultural runoff remains the single largest contributor to nutrient and sediment deliveries to waterways. As a result, many groups are working to increase adoption of BMPs using a wide variety of methods. For this study we interviewed farmers from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia about their views on conservation practitioners and BMPs.
What did we find and why does it matter?
From farmer interviews, we learned that farmers are generally pleased with their interactions with technical assistance providers, but they also identified concerns. The vast majority of farmers graded their assistance providers with A and B grades and remarked that the most helpful characteristics were having people knowledgeable about farming, tailoring recommendations to farm and farmer capacity, and providing clear and accurate information about programs and following through. Farmers who gave practitioners high grades were also more likely to have adopted BMPs. Those who had less satisfying interactions with practitioners most frequently mentioned that assistance providers did not respect their production goals (e.g., organic farming) or were personally disrespectful.
We also found that assistance is not reaching all interested farmers, although the farmers who reported no contact with technical assistance tended to have small farms with non-traditional crops, which may have limited their eligibility for many programs. Farm characteristics also likely made them a lower priority for technical assistance provider outreach.
Example Quotes from Farmers about Technical Assistance
“I’m all about doing the right things for the environment … However, they have to go hand in hand with being able to sustain our farm too.”
“She was really good at just kind of coming up with what would fit for us and be manageable for us.”
What did we do?
Our interviews with farmers were designed to learn what farmers felt was working or not working when they engaged with technical assistance providers. We designed our sample of farmers to represent an even distribution of farm sizes, production types, and locations. We created a list of 109 farmers, distributed evenly among Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, using an online database and subject area experts’ knowledge of the farming community. We created themes and coded interview statements as to whether they were positive, negative or neutral about technical assistance providers. We conducted two different types of statistical analyses to analyze our combined qualitative and quantitative data. First, we assessed the power of the concepts within the qualitative framework for explaining variability in the performance grades that farmers gave to conservation practitioners. Second, we tested whether the number of conservation practices reported as adopted by respondents was explained by (a) whether they met with a technical assistance provider and (b) if so, the extent to which that provider met their expectations.
Publication completed for this work
Read, D. J., Carroll, A., & Wainger, L. (accepted). Enhancing institutional fit without formal institutional change: Farmer-practitioner relationships and agricultural conservation programs in the Chesapeake Bay, USA. Ecology and Society.
