Ensuring positive behavioural change for farmers towards best practice for clean growth: economic and behavioural investigations

Improving Agricultural Practice

2022-2027

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

Scotland’s Rural College

Progress

2022 / 2023

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.

2023 / 2024

Objective 1 investigates economic and environmental performance of farms to develop benchmarks representing basic practice, and to identify opportunities for enhancing industry performance. We built a time series of Farm Business Survey (FBS) data for benchmarking, integrating production risk within our assessments. Building the time series as a ready-for-research dataset required compilation of replicable coding structures and consolidation of variables across annual FBS data modules with limited documentation. These data serve as a basis for all further benchmarking modelling. Data analysis has firstly focused on cattle systems in Less Favoured Areas (LFAs), deriving benchmarks of efficiency, resilience and carbon emissions within an integrated framework. We found that higher level performance across multiple dimensions may merit higher payments if an outcomes-based payment scheme were adopted. Concerning environmental performance indicators, working with colleagues within RESAS, we have developed a recommended suite of metrics for policy and industry on carbon and nitrogen use efficiency which will be updated annually.

Objective 2 investigates determinants of best practice adoption across farmers. We compiled a list of factors to explain (in)efficiency, and systematically mapped the literature concerning the adoption of ecological practices by European farmers. In this review, we identified that personal, social, and formal institutional variables have been under-researched in the existing literature, and that influences vary whether we look at the adoption of a single practice compared to several. We also developed indicators of agroecological practice adoption across the EU, and will use the time series data set described in Objective 1 to investigate the most appropriate indicator for Scottish Agriculture. We also selected measures to investigate within an adoption tool that provides projections of peak adoption rates and times for technologies of interest to current agricultural policy reform. The measures include feed additives to reduce methane emissions in cattle, nitrogen inhibitors and cover crops. We have commenced planning for workshops with policy makers and farmers using the adoption tool to better understand their conceptualisation of the process of measure adoption. We conducted (jointly with JHI) the Farmer Intention Survey, a recurring survey of more than 2,000 farmers to investigate farmers' views and intentions concerning a wide range of topical issues such as availability of agricultural labour, uptake of practices and new technologies, and access to subsidies.

Objective 3 investigates the costs and benefits of (policy) interventions, and the use of experimental approaches to inform policy development. To appraise the costs and benefits of changes in agricultural practice and external pressures on farming such as price inflation, we have updated a farm level model (ScotFarm) to better reflect variation in efficiency across farms. We also built models to assess the impact of disease outbreaks on Scottish consumption, production and trade. Further interventions are being identified with policy colleagues. As a first experiment, we conducted a survey of more than 1,200 farmers, that embeds experimental approaches to investigate farmers' acceptance of carbon schemes to inform policy development on greenhouse gas mitigation.

This project supports Scottish Government policy by supporting an evidence base for agricultural transition. Our focus is on applied interventions to encourage best practice within the industry. We engage on a regular basis with ongoing policy discussions, e.g. as part of the Agriculture Reform Implementation Oversight Board (ARIOB), but also support directed questions around uptake and performance of technologies and practices. For example, we provided advice on the environmental impacts and uptake of technologies and practices in the context of Scottish Government's National Test Programme that supports evidence based transformation of Scottish agriculture.

Our engagement with policy has also led to support for framing narratives around reform, including presentation of wider metrics of performance, specifically for carbon emissions and nitrogen use efficiency as key pillars of the government's sustainability strategy. Moreover, we have been developing a structural typology of farms that are more likely to adopt 'regenerative agricultural practices', thus addressing a key ambition set out by the Cabinet Minister for future agricultural support policy. We also responded to a range of evidence requests from Scottish Government based on existing data, for example to understand how land use intentions of farmers differ across farm types.

Our capacity, developed as part of this and related projects, has been fundamental in providing recommendations for policy via a range of commissioned projects. These include, for example, developing conceptual frameworks for conditional agricultural support, and assessing the spatial impacts of agricultural policy on viability and efficiency.

Previous Projects

Increasing uptake of best practice

How rural economies can adapt to key external drivers

Resilience of rural economies to key external drivers

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There are concerns about the long-term viability of some rural businesses due to their lack of profitability.
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Improving Agricultural Practice
Land Use
Rural Economy
Land Reform

2016-2022

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Ensuring positive behavioural change for farmers towards best practice for clean growth: economic and behavioural investigations