Understanding farmers’ adoption of diversified crop rotations in South Dakota, USA: an examination of the roles of sense of place and social responsibility

ABSTRACT

Diversified crop rotations can be a win-win solution for farmers and society given increased agronomic yield and improved ecosystem services. However, the adoption of sustainable production practices must be widespread and accelerated to create resilient agroecosystems that can remain productive as the climate changes. In this paper, we use modified measures of sense of place (SOP) and social responsibility (SR) to investigate the factors that influence the adoption of diversified crop rotations (DCR) among producers in South Dakota (SD). Data was collected from 34 SD counties east of the Missouri River. Through the application of exploratory factor analysis (EFA), we identified 3 constructs of SOP on working landscapes 1) place attachment and identity, 2) social networks, and 3) physical place dependence. Using a binary logistic regression, a positive association between the adoption of DCR and place attachment and identity was found. This suggests that farmers have an emotional bond to their land that plays a role in their usage of DCR. Our results suggest that measuring some dimensions of SOP in a working landscape context is important, but needs more refinement, specifically economic dependence, given that the items measuring it did not emerge as a factor in the EFA.

KEYWORDS:

• Adoption
• conservation agriculture
• diversified crop rotation
• sense of place
• social responsibility

Acknowledgments

We appreciate the time that farmers took out of their busy schedules to respond to our survey and thank Abdelrahim Abulbasher (a Ph.D. student at South Dakota State University at the time) for his help in implementing the survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author agreement

All authors agree with this manuscript’s content, which has not been published or copyrighted elsewhere, nor are they under consideration for publication in any other journal.

Ethics approval/consent for publication

Ethical research standards for the treatment of human participants in the research design and process were overseen and approved by the Institutional Review Board at South Dakota State University. Written to voluntarily participate in the study and to have data analyzed and findings publicly disseminated were attained from all human participants.

Additional information

Funding

The South Dakota Corn Utilization Council provided financial support for this work.