Ensuring positive behavioural change for farmers towards best practice for clean growth: economic and behavioural investigations
Project Lead
Challenges
The Scottish agricultural sector faces a significant transition following the UK’s Exit from the European Union. The replacement of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with a national agricultural policy offers opportunities to reconfigure the aims and objectives of agricultural support. Societal demand and policy ambition to address climate and biodiversity emergencies, animal welfare and a sustainable post-covid economic recovery are shaping the vision for the future of Scottish agriculture.
Potential changes in the governance of farm support offer opportunities for improving best practices and targeting support around mechanisms that are efficient and equitable. This would enable a cleaner growth pathway for the industry and enhance the financial resilience of businesses. To sustain visions of a highly productive and more sustainable industry, farmers and land managers need to embrace new ways of working and must adapt their farm’s performance to delivering socially desirable outcomes alongside productivity goals to meet policy targets.
Previous research has shown that Scottish farming is average in terms of productivity growth but that there are long tails between average performance and best practice. This offers opportunities for efficiency gains that exist across Scottish farming and allows the identification of opportunities that combine enhanced productivity while curbing pollution, known as ‘Clean Growth.’ Realising the potential for clean growth requires an understanding of the complex factors that guide the adoption of basic and best practices at the farm level. Research on farmers’ attitudes and intentions points to discrete pockets of behavioural farmer types that are likely to respond differently to selected drivers and incentives.
Questions
- To what extent is basic and best farming practice in Scottish agriculture applied?
- Where are the opportunities for improving the inefficiencies in Scottish agriculture? What are the barriers to increasing the level of basic and best practices in Scottish agriculture and how do we reduce them, thus improving productivity?
- How can we maximise farmer involvement and uptake to get the most from policies to affect change, leading to a more productive and less vulnerable sector?
Solutions
This project aims to inform policy development for a transition to a new support model for Scottish Agriculture. More specifically, we are revealing opportunities for ensuring basic and best practices adoption, evaluating acceptance, costs, benefits, and uptake of selected technologies, and advancing understanding of the effectiveness of interventions to promote behavioural change in farmers.
Baselining current performance
We are making innovative use of existing and emerging data to benchmark basic and best practice in relation to productivity and financial vulnerability as a foundation for evaluation of change and identifying opportunities for best practice adoption and pathways for clean growth in Scottish agriculture. We are combining data from the Farm Business Survey, the Farm Structure Survey, June Agricultural Census, Cattle Tracing Scheme, and related data to investigate how to best incentivise and promote farmer involvement for basic and best practice adoption. We are mindful of the role that supply chain actors and the financial service industry play in enabling or constraining behavioural change at a sectoral level. This is activity is benchmarking estimates of basic and best practices based on both technical and environmental efficiency.
Adoption of best practice
We are understanding the drivers and barriers behind basic and best practices relative to the Scottish agricultural population, across the strata of economic, social, biophysical, and environmental performance. This work uses the database (described above) to provide an in-depth econometric analysis of factors (including farm and farmer characteristics) explaining variation in inefficiencies. This investigation will reveal important constraints affecting basic and best practice adoption at the farm level.
The development and delivery of the Farmers Intentions Survey (FIS) is the next aspect of this work. The FIS is a representative telephone survey of Scottish farmers using a spatially and sectorally representative sample based on the agricultural census.
We are applying models of best practice adoption in agriculture that integrate a wide range of technical, socio-economic, and behavioural factors and constraints to identify the scope for practice adoption over time. This activity is informing policy design for uptake through model-based scenarios of adoption patterns and peak adoption rates.
Appraisal of interventions
We are assessing the impact and feasibility of interventions which reduce barriers to best practice adoption and support clean growth. This activity is organised into two areas:
- Using a farm-level model to appraise the costs and benefits of measures
- Investigating―through experimental approaches―the impact of incentives and policy interventions on best practice acceptability and uptake
Project Partners
Progress
We have made further progress in updating ScotFarm, a model that predicts impacts of management changes on gross margins at farm level. We have continued to add information on technical efficiency for each of the production components (such as the 'milk production' component for the dairy farm type, for example). Further changes have involved relaxing the assumption that each farmer is fully efficient in production, is expected to enhance the validity of model outputs.
We have exchanged information on relevant policy timelines with Scottish government (SG) and have engaged with SG and industry stakeholders through various fora and events. This includes discussions with members of the National Testing programme on practices, discussions with SG about the content of the June Agricultural Census that led to the inclusion of additional practices important for greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation, presentations to the SG livestock policy team on using information in the Cattle Tracing System data to derive future policy conditions that can influence behaviours and reduce GHGs, and workshops on Animal Health Invterventions for Climate Change with policy/industry.
Related Projects
The aim of research deliverable is to explore the uptake of practices which improve the efficiency, productivity and sustainability of land, crop and livestock management throughout Scotland. The research builds on previous work within the RESAS Strategic Programme and on collaborations with UK and international partners.
- Improving Agricultural Practice
- 2016-2022
The aim of this RD is to improve understanding of recent and anticipated adaptive responses to environmental change, policy drivers and market shifts. This will identify processes of innovation, diversification and collaborative action in agricultural household adjustment and assess future influences on the adaptive capacity of segments of the agriculture sector.
- Improving Agricultural Practice
- Land Use
- 2016-2022