A farm systems approach to the adoption of sustainable nitrogen management practices in California
Date
2021-02-04
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Springer Nature
Abstract
Improving nitrogen (N) fertilizer management in agricultural systems is critical to meeting environmental goals while maintaining economically viable and productive food systems. This paper applies a farm systems framework to analyze how adoption of N management practices is related to different farming operation characteristics and the extent to which fertilizer, soil and irrigation practices are related to each other. We develop a multivariate probit regression model to analyze the interdependency of these adoption behaviors from 966 farmers across three watersheds and diverse cropping systems in the Central Valley of California. Our analysis demonstrates that farmers adopt varying combinations or portfolios of practices, with the most common portfolio featuring a core set of fertilizer-focused practices. Irrigation infrastructure is an especially important farm operation characteristic for encouraging adoption of innovative practice portfolios that integrate water and fertilizer management. These findings highlight the ability for a farm systems approach to improve our understanding of farmer decision-making across diverse agricultural landscapes.
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© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Version of Scholarly Record of this Article is published in Agriculture and Human Values, 2021, available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-021-10190-5 . Keywords: agricultural decision-making; nitrogen management; farmer adoption; farm systems; multivariate probit regression.
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Citation
Rudnick, J., Lubell, M., Khalsa, S.D.S. et al. A farm systems approach to the adoption of sustainable nitrogen management practices in California. Agric Hum Values 38, 783–801 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10190-5