State-wide soil health programs for education and on-farm assessment: Lessons learned

Embracing Disconcertment

“…Nevertheless, embedded in each data point are webs of social relations and power-including farmers' histories with the landscape, their relationships to other farmers, and their relationships (or the lack thereof) with agents distributing state and federal agricultural resources. As noted above, the limited data we have about farmers collaborating in OFR suggests that they tend to be younger, better educated, and wealthier than the general farming population (Goodwin et al 1997); and they tend to have prior relationships with researchers (Kladivko et al 2019). While there is no data to my knowledge on the gender or race of OFR collaborators in the United States, the representation gaps identified in medicine index the potential consequences of this situation (Clark et al 2019;Flores et al 2021; National Academies of Sciences and Medicine 2022).…”

“…Notably, when it comes to which farmers are engaged in OFR, several papers emphasise the role of prior relationships between farmers and the researchers or agricultural professionals (including Extension) (Goodwin et al 1997;Kladivko et al 2019;Thompson et al 2019). In most cases, this relationship is framed as an advantage on which researchers should capitalise when enlisting farmers into OFR.…”

Reflections for enhancing participatory research and outreach from a multistakeholder soil health program

“…Further, we found that annual networking meetings were an important vehicle for presenting on-farm research results to a broader community of farmers and stakeholders interested in learning about cover crops and soil health (figure 4). While implementation of the SHI encountered many of the complex challenges reported by other colleagues involved in similar state-wide soil health programs (Kladivko et al 2019), multistakeholder initiatives for soil health research and education are collaborative efforts with the potential to serve as a bridge between scientific and applied knowledge. According to Hardie Hale et al (2022), many factors of the collaborative research process influence effective learning and networking amongst project partners: having mutually beneficial goals, sharing ownership of the collaborative research process, building trust, integrating knowledge, and institutional alignment.…”