Elsevier

Food Policy

Volume 32, Issue 1, February 2007, Pages 25-48
Food Policy

Farmers’ adoption of conservation agriculture: A review and synthesis of recent research

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2006.01.003Get rights and content

Abstract

In light of growing concerns over the implications of many conventional agricultural practices, and especially the deep tilling of soils, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), among others, has begun to promote a package of soil conserving practices under the banner of ‘conservation agriculture’. While the title might be novel, its associated practices have long been employed by farmers, and studied by social scientists seeking to understand the reasons for their adoption and non-adoption. This paper reviews and synthesizes this past research in order to identify those independent variables that regularly explain adoption, and thereby facilitate policy prescriptions to augment adoption around the world. While a disaggregated analysis of a subset of commonly used variables reveals some underlying patterns of influence, once various contextual factors (e.g. study locale or method) are controlled, the primary finding of the synthesis is that there are few if any universal variables that regularly explain the adoption of conservation agriculture across past analyses. Given the limited prospect of identifying such variables through further research, we conclude that efforts to promote conservation agriculture will have to be tailored to reflect the particular conditions of individual locales.

Introduction

In many regions of the world, there is growing concern about the soil productivity and wider environmental implications of conventional agricultural practices, and especially the tilling of soils by plough, disk or hoe. This has prompted governments and farmers to explore alternative production methods that maintain soil structure and productivity. Conservation tillage, be it minimum- or no-till, is an obvious and increasingly popular alternative, but so too is the use of cover crops, extensive crop rotations, and straw mulch. These well known practices have recently been packaged and promoted under the label ‘conservation agriculture’ by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the European Conservation Agriculture Federation (ECAF), and others.

According to its promoters, the overall goal of conservation agriculture is to make better use of agricultural resources (than does conventional agriculture) through the integrated management of available soil, water and biological resources such that external inputs can be minimized (FAO, 2001, García-Torres et al., 2003). Its primary feature, and indeed central tenet, is the maintenance of a permanent or semi-permanent soil cover, be it a live crop or dead mulch, which serves to protect the soil from sun, rain and wind, and feed soil biota.2 This biotic community is essential as it provides a ‘biological tillage’ that serves to replace the functions of conventional tillage (FAO, 2001). That being said, during the transition phase especially, the loss of pest and disease maintenance previously afforded by conventional tillage necessitates chemical inputs, which ideally are used in moderation as part of an integrated pest management system in order to ensure a healthy biotic community. Hence, although conservation agriculture more deliberately exploits natural processes than conventional agriculture, it is not synonymous with organic agriculture.

Within the academic literature, the term conservation agriculture has scarcely been used; however, it is arguably useful for a variety of reasons. Most significantly, it provides a unifying label for a number of related soil management practices. This can aid in their promotion by extension officers locally and by organisations like the FAO globally. It also allows and encourages analysts to conduct location-specific impact assessments, be it with respect to crop yields, farm profitability or regional environmental condition, on a package of practices, rather than individual ones as has often been the case in the past.3 Similarly, and of particular relevance to this paper, social scientists seeking to identify financial and other factors that appear to influence a farmer’s decision to adopt practices such as conservation tillage or straw mulching might benefit from aggregating the findings of a number of hitherto distinct, yet clearly related, empirical investigations (e.g. Rahm and Huffman, 1984, Nowak, 1987, Caveness and Kurtz, 1993, Westra and Olson, 1997, Uri, 1997, Okoye, 1998, Clay et al., 1998) under the rubric of conservation agriculture. Ideally, such aggregation could: (i) enable the identification of those independent variables that regularly (i.e. universally) explain adoption; and (ii) facilitate policy prescriptions to augment adoption around the world.

This paper attempts such an aggregation. Instead of undertaking another site-specific investigation among a particular sample of farmers of possible correlations between the adoption of conservation agriculture practices and independent variables such as age, land tenure or education level, which would render site-specific generalizations and most likely modest insights relative to existing knowledge, we seek to review and synthesize past research efforts in order to establish the state of existing knowledge. The paper follows in five further parts. In the following section, the benefits and costs of conservation agriculture at a number of spatial scales are reviewed in order to identify the divergence between privately appropriable benefits and benefits accruing to wider society. In turn, “Factors influencing the adoption of conservation agriculture: a review” reviews the findings of 31 recent empirical analyses of the farm-level adoption of a number of soil management and wider conservation practices consistent with conservation agriculture in order to explain, in general terms, how certain variables, grouped within four categories, tend to influence adoption. More significantly, in “Factors influencing the adoption of conservation agriculture: a synthesis” a synthesis of these same 31 analyses is undertaken in order to identify those independent variables that consistently or regularly explain adoption. Given these results and the desire of the FAO and others to see the further expansion of conservation agriculture, some policy implications and concrete prescriptions are identified in “Policy implications and prescriptions”. Lastly, some general conclusions are offered.

Section snippets

The benefits and costs of conservation agriculture

Table 1 presents a generalized profile of the benefits and costs associated with conservation agriculture at the farm, regional/national and global scales. This perspective effectively reveals the divergence between the social desirability of conservation agriculture and its potential attractiveness to individual farmers; while many of the incremental costs associated with adopting conservation agriculture accrue at the farm level, most of the benefits are captured by society.

Factors influencing the adoption of conservation agriculture: a review

There is a long and rich tradition of empirical research that seeks to explain farmers’ adoption of particular agricultural innovations. As outlined by Feder et al. (1985), researchers typically select a number of potential independent variables for inclusion in their analysis based on prior theorizing and test, usually via logistic (logit) or probit regression, to determine which variables correlate with adoption in some statistically significant sense. For our review of conservation

Factors influencing the adoption of conservation agriculture: a synthesis

The review above reveals some support within the empirical literature for a number of assertions concerning the adoption of conservation agriculture. However, it is also clear that the empirical record contains many ambiguities and inconsistent results. In this section, an attempt is made to synthesize these disparate results and to ascertain whether there is a more discernible pattern amongst the variables typically included in a site-specific analysis of the adoption of conservation

Policy implications and prescriptions

The absence of any clear universally significant factors affecting conservation agriculture adoption, and especially the sometimes contradictory results observed across analyses, makes the FAO’s and others’ task of developing policies to promote globally the adoption of conservation agriculture particularly challenging. Indeed, the above results tend to support the view of Stonehouse (1996) and others who advocate a ‘targeted policy approach’ to promoting conservation agriculture, whereby

Conclusions

Conventional agricultural practices, and especially the deep tilling of soils, have increasingly been seen as problematic by those concerned with the health of agroecosystems and ultimately global food security. In response, the concept of conservation agriculture has been developed to aggregate a number of related soil management and conservation techniques under a single banner for purposes of promotion and analysis. While the concept may be novel, many of its associated techniques have been

Acknowledgements

The authors thank FAO for sponsoring this research, and particularly Jan Poulisse, but it should be noted that the views expressed here are not necessarily those of FAO. Research assistance provided by Debbie Gordon, Mahesh Poudyal and Neil Philcox is also gratefully acknowledged.

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