Co-designing and implementing best-fit farming practices

Challenges

With a value of around £14 billion each year, the food and drink industry in Scotland is a significant contributor to the economy. This significant capacity has underpinned Scotland’s reputation as a land of high-quality, healthy food and drink. All of this has helped formulate Scotland’s Food and Drink Ambition 2030 aims to double the value of the food and drink sector by 2030 to £30 billion. However, the increasing problems of climate change, in terms of long-term basic environmental change and increased weather extremes, are making production increasingly challenging.

The drive to net zero recently has been accelerated by the update to the Scottish climate change plan with the associated potential to transform the agricultural and food production system. At the same time, it is well recognised that greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and related land use accounted for 24% of the total emissions in 2017, down 29% from the baseline levels of 1990.

Major changes to farmer behaviour are needed to achieve the Scottish Government’s climate change targets whilst developing a resilient, productive agricultural sector following the UK’s departure from the European Union. Improving agricultural practices will be critical for ensuring sustainable and resource-efficient food production, supporting rural community resilience and economic development, addressing the biodiversity and nature crises, facilitating green recovery, and tackling the global climate emergency.

Questions

Solutions

This project identifies and develop approaches which aim to influence farm-level actions substantially and incrementally, recognising that these occur within broad institutional and economic contexts.

Major transformational changes tend to occur more sporadically, in response to ‘trigger’ events. In Scotland, triggers are expected to include the effects of the EU exit, the progression of Scotland’s land reform agenda and generational renewal. It may also include less predictable triggers such as disease outbreaks and major weather events. Following these types of triggers, farmers have been shown to actively seek and implement innovative solutions. We are quantifying the impact and influence of ‘trigger events’ on basic and best-fit practices, developing measurable approaches for influencing farmer behaviour. Best fit practices are the optimal practices for a given farm within its socio-ecological context.

The project advances previous studies which have demonstrated that farmers are not always profit maximisers: farmers respond strongly to social norms and have a range of ‘lock-ins’. The project builds on participatory approaches demonstrating that social learning processes can facilitate co-innovation in farming practice. These new approaches are being promoted through on-farm demonstrations, workshops, training events and multimedia campaigns.

The project achieves these outcomes through a combination of:

• Farmer Intentions Survey - longitudinal research with a representative sample of Scottish farmers identifying key trigger points and incremental shifts in farming practice
• ‘Living Labs’ to work directly with farmers and industry stakeholders to co-create, implement, and evaluate approaches to influencing farmer behaviour ‘ on the ground’
• Three sets of empirical case studies linked to the living labs assess how best-fit practices are understood and communicated amongst farmers' economic experiments to test the utility of new measures and interventions and how these can be implemented

The case studies particularly emphasise social media and digital platforms. Many farmers have digitally upskilled during the pandemic, altering how they learn about and assess practices. It offers new opportunities for promoting transformational change that we are capitalising on in this project.

Project Partners

Progress