List of drivers and barriers governing soil management by farmers, including cost aspects
Liste des pilotes et des obstacles qui régissent la gestion des sols par les agriculteurs, y compris les aspects de coûts
Résumé
This report consists of two components: (i) an overview of drivers and barriers for the adoption of so-called ‘Best Management Practices’ (BMPs) in soil management, as seen through the eyes of farmers (the extensive Chapter 2); and (ii) an inventory of cost associated with the implementation of certain BMPs at the farm (the brief Chapter 3). The overview of drivers and barriers presented in Chapter 2 is based on a survey held among 10,000 farmers in different farm types across all CATCH-C partner countries, 2520 of whom responded. The inventory of costs to implement BMPs is based on empirical information collected by the research team in the project partner countries, through various channels. The BMPs studied in the farmer survey include options for crop rotation, tillage, nutrient management, crop residue management, water management, and grassland management. The survey was carried out in 24 major ‘farm type x agri-environmental zone’ (FTZ) units across eight partner countries, three per country. An FTZ unit is defined by the combination of an agri-environmental zone (with climate, slope, and soil texture as keys) with a farm type (arable-cereal, arable-specialised, dairy, mixed, etc.). The criteria to select FTZs for the farm surveys were 1) representation of a large agricultural area, 2) large economic value of the FTZ and/or 3) occurrence of soil degradation problems. In most agri-environmental zones, one specific farm type was studied, or sometimes two. Our FTZ units were also called ‘major farm types’ in other project documents. To identify drivers and barriers for adopting Best Management Practices (BMPs), we applied a behavioural approach, based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1988; Ajzen, 1991), to identify the main barriers and drivers of farmers towards adoption of sustainable management practices. The theory and details of the results obtained were extensively reported in Deliverable D4.422 of the CATCH-C project (Bijttebier et al., 2014).