Predicting who can change farm practice

Agriculture is under increasing pressure to redesign farm systems to keep increasing productivity, adapt to climate change, and improve environmental performance. Meeting these pressures requires a combination of responses from farmers, ranging from incremental adjustments to their farm systems through to complete transformation into an entirely new enterprise. Clearly, making incremental adjustments to a farm system is much easier than transforming it. Different types of change require different resource commitments, different time horizons, different skills, different knowledge, and different levels of planning and project management. This means that government or industry policies intended to support changing farm systems must be tailored to the type of change a farmer is facing.

This raises an important challenge, because the same practice (say, fencing off streams) may be an incremental change for one farmer but a complex change for another because of subtle differences in their farm systems. If this is the case, then some farmers might change practice quickly, because the change is incremental and inexpensive for them, while others may change much more slowly (if ever), because the change is highly complex and costly for them. Consequently, some farmers will need a lot more planning support and financial assistance to make the change than others.

This means that having a way to categorise changes in farm practices can enable off-farm support (e.g. from industry or government) to be targeted more effectively.

To do this categorisation we have trialled a new method for classifying changes to farm systems into four types (strategic, tactical, complex, and simple) to see if this can predict the nature of the resources, skills, knowledge, planning, and time needed to implement the different types of change on farms. In the test we used survey data on the adoption by New Zealand farmers of four environmentally beneficial practices (fencing wet areas, fencing streams, planting cover crops after winter grazing, and installing ungrazed buffer strips along laneways). We found that most farmers had adopted one or more of the practices when it involved a simple change, but a much smaller proportion had adopted a practice when it involved a complex change. Almost none of the farmers had adopted a practice when it involved a tactical or strategic change. We also found differences in the amount of learning and decision-making associated with the different types of change.

Using this categorisation approach, the Farm Practice Change Typology allows those offering support to farmers on practice change to better distinguish farmers who haven’t made changes but could from those who can’t easily make changes. Conversations with those that can’t make changes can then concentrate on the support needed for change to happen, or what else might be done to achieve the same outcome.