Environmental Concerns and Stewardship Behaviors Among Rural Landowners: What Supports Farmers and Non-farmers in Being Good Stewards?

Abstract

Intensive agriculture is a main factor of biodiversity and ecosystem services loss globally. It is therefore of great importance to understand how rural landowners are managing their lands and how environmental stewardship behaviors could be strengthened. Farming and non-farming rural landowners are often considered a homogenous group. In reality, however, they vary by their histories, attitudes, interests, and resources. While many rural landowners manage their lands with environmental values in mind, others may struggle to do so. Ignoring this diversity poses the risk that planning and policy for sustainable agriculture are less effective than they could be. Hence, it is of interest to understand the variety of environmental perceptions and stewardship behaviors across these varied groups. To help addressing this knowledge gap, we conducted a survey of 1,200 farming and non-farming rural landowners, using Ontario as a case study. We specifically investigated whether farming landowners differed from non-farming landowners in expressed environmental concerns and stewardship behaviors, as well as what the roles are of participation in conservation incentive programs, demographic factors, and landholding characteristics. We analyzed survey answers with logistic regression and text analysis. Our results suggest that farming landowners are generally less environmentally concerned than non-farming landowners. However, it appears that this difference may be less driven by farm ownership than by contextual factors, such as landowner age and participation in conservation programs. Participation in conservation programs was more pronounced for non-farming landowners and was associated with higher likelihood of environmental concerns and engaging with stewardship behaviors. In contrast, higher age emerged as predictor of lower environmental concerns. In addition, we found that cost factors and knowledge needs were important barriers for stewardship behaviors across farming and non-farming rural landowners. Based on our results, we are making recommendations for increasing the effectiveness of agricultural sustainability planning and policy in Ontario, focusing on reducing financial and knowledge barriers to pro-environmental land management behaviors.

Interviews with farmers from the US corn belt highlight opportunity for improved decision support systems and continued structural barriers to farmland diversification

“…However, despite the strong evidence for agronomic and environmental benefits of diversification, crop and landscape diversity in the Corn Belt has continued to decrease over the past century as corn and soybean acres have increased (Bigelow et al, 2020;Lark et al, 2020;Morefield et al, 2016;Weisberger et al, 2021). While largely driven by structural farm policy influences on commodity supply and prices (Coppess, 2018(Coppess, , 2017, increasing landscape simplification is also influenced by individual socioeconomic and cultural factors: productivist vs. multi-objective mindsets; the increasing amount of farmland that is rented; differing concerns by landowners about land use; constraints on farm resources; lack of alternative markets; learning curves and potential negative experiences that come with trial and error of new practices; and the present general status quo of corn and soybeans (Drescher & Warriner, 2022;Esquivel et al, 2021;Lark et al, 2022;Larsen et al, 2019;Luther et al, 2020;Prokopy et al, 2019;Ranjan et al, 2019;Roesch-McNally et al, 2018;Wauters et al, 2021). Given the variety and complexity of factors that dictate agricultural decision-making, it is clear that facilitating these decisions requires a robust and evidenced framework.…”

Place Attachment, Self-Efficacy, and Farmers’ Farmland Quality Protection Behavior: Evidence from China

“…Moreover, farmers are more likely to exhibit FQPB in agricultural production if their education levels and annual household incomes are relatively high [8]. Nonetheless, several studies have demonstrated that farmers' gender status and educational level do not affect FQPB [9]. The aforementioned contradiction among the empirical evidence has prompted researchers to consider FQPB from the human-land relations perspective.…”