| The United States Congress recently passed the 2002 Farm Security and Rural Investment Act (farm bill). The farm bill significantly increases conservation assistance to farmers. However, research is still lacking concerning what causes farmers to adopt conservation practices. To make conservation policy as effective as possible, it is necessary to understand why farmers adopt conservation practices.; Two methods of inquiry are used to explore this question: a 1,617 respondent survey of agricultural landowners in five states and focused interviews of a subset of these landowners. Logistic regression is used to analyze the survey data to find factors that are associated with the likelihood of adopting various types of conservation practices. The open-ended interviews are then used to explore issues difficult to address in survey questions. Results from the logistic regression models disprove some of the literature based hypotheses, support others, and offer some unexpected findings. The focused interviews show that landowners have multiple motivations for adopting conservation practices, but they are constrained by their operations and external factors. |
