Are farmers suffering from "cognitive lock-ins" in the quest for sustainable food?
Modern food production methods, including those used in the UK, are mostly bad news for the planet. But too few farmers are transitioning to agricultural practices that are better for biodiversity, soil health, and the climate, and “cognitive lock-ins” are a key barrier to wider adoption of such practices, according to a new study. But there are ways to overcome these lock-ins, and they could also help farmers transition from livestock to plant agriculture.
A team of researchers from the Diverfarming project, which studies crop diversification and low-input farming in Europe, looked at the conditions that affect farmers’ decision-making when it comes to adopting practices accepted as more sustainable. They conducted in-depth interviews with farmers in Cornwall and Gelderland in the Netherlands about crop diversification by adding legumes into the rotation, which is underused in European agriculture despite being “an established strategy to increase biodiversity and soil health, and reduce agrochemical use, emissions and pollution.” The interviews revealed that “the specific socio-technical settings” that the farmers operated in caused them to focus on achieving the economic goal of maximising profit (“gain-oriented goals”) over what they perceived as normative goals - those which are about “doing what is appropriate and contributing to collective goals.”
The problem is not that farmers lack knowledge about the environmental or even the financial benefits of growing legumes, which increases soil fertility thus reducing costs of fertilisation. Rather legumes are associated with normative goals because their environmental benefits tend to be emphasised as a way to encourage their adoption. This then conflicts with the gain-oriented goals that dominate the institutional context (rules, subsidies, etc.) of farming. “Institutions interact with individuals’ goal frames, create incentives and disincentives for certain behaviours, and delimit decision-makers’ autonomy,” write the researchers. “When barriers in the institutional context are stronger than drivers promoting change, the current focal goal of decision-makers will be strengthened, their actions will gravitate around the status quo, and the institutional setting will be reproduced, creating a lock-in.”
What all this tells us is that institutional factors can “impede farmers’ recognition” of the financial benefits of legumes (or other sustainable but underused practices) because they are promoted on normative grounds while the institutional context favours gain-oriented goals. Additionally, it’s apparent that close-knit farming communities can be suspicious of and hostile to those who choose to do something different. This is clear from the fact that farmers who choose to vaccinate rather than cull badgers on their land as a response to the bovine TB risk do so without informing their neighbours or how the Ethical Dairy, which lets calves stay with their mothers for five months is considered “toxic” by the rest of the industry. A farmer in Canada who turned his farm into an animal sanctuary told the BBC, "My neighbours don't talk to me. They think I'm anti-farming.” These can be powerful further incentives to conform to dominant ways of doing things.
But there are measures that can be implemented to help more farmers transition to sustainable practices - which would also further normalise them. Subsidies for diversifying crops with legumes are clearly one, but the study also suggests that “societal recognition of ecological values, in this case for legumes, and related shifts in markets and consumers preferences may be essential to increase the salience of normative goal frames in farmers’ decision-making.” The issue is that if financial gains become the only focus of those practices, this reinforces the dominance of gain-oriented goals at the expense of “intrinsic motivation based on hedonic [pleasure] or normative frames.” In other words, encouraging sustainable practices should not only be about maximising profit, as such a framing of goals has arguably led us to our current crises. In addition, if financial incentives are not permanent, a lasting shift to sustainable practices would need to be reinforced by normative motivations and policy-making.
Though the study mainly interviewed arable farmers, the findings could likely apply to livestock farmers too. Though the environmental importance of shifting to plant-based diets is broadly recognised, policy-makers are doing very little to support this shift at the level of consumption or food production. More emphasis on the economic and environmental benefits of growing legumes and crop diversification could help encourage more livestock farmers - many of whom are struggling financially and are considering quitting - to change what they farm. Policy-makers should thus recognise cognitive lock-ins which cause farmers to overlook the financial viability of growing legumes due to institutional contexts, as one of several barriers to a sustainable transition for the food system.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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