Involvement: a novel approach for understanding responses to nutrient budgeting

Abstract

The New Zealand dairy industry has responded to concerns about the impact of dairying on the environment by implementing a range of voluntary policy initiatives. One initiative emphasises that all dairy farmers have systems to manage nutrient inputs and outputs, with the completion of a nutrient budget as a measure of achievement. The research outlined in this paper was designed to explore the effort farmers put into responding to the policy in order to determine their involvement in nutrient budgets. Qualitative interviews with 20 dairy farmers were undertaken. The results suggest that involvement with the current policy is low. Further work is required to determine whether and how involvement could be increased to help industry and policy makers with the next stage of this initiative. This research demonstrates that understanding how involved farmers are in an issue is one way of highlighting possible policy adoption drivers and barriers during the implementation process.

Evaluation of agri-environmental policies for reducing nitrate pollution from New Zealand dairy farms accounting for firm heterogeneity

“…Indeed, none of the CRMPs are profitable in the absence of regulation, so the model predicts that broad scale voluntary adoption is unlikely to occur, in line with recent research (e.g. Bewsell and Brown, 2011).…”

“…Much reliance has been placed on voluntary mechanisms to promote water quality improvement among New Zealand dairy producers, such as the 2003 Clean Streams Accord. However, there is growing evidence that these measures are too weak to achieve outcomes commensurate with the value of environmental assets to society, both in New Zealand (Bewsell and Brown, 2011) and in Australia (Pannell, 2008). Indeed, regional environmental regulatory bodies throughout New Zealand are now focused on reducing the nutrient enrichment of waterways through appropriate regulation of agriculture (e.g.…”