A Graduate Exit Seminar will be presented by Tara Ritter on Friday, July 13 at 1:00 p.m. in 333C Kottman Hall. His presentation will be Exploring the Relationship between Risk Perception and Farmer Nutrient Management Decisions.
Non-point source runoff from agricultural production is impairing water quality around the world. One way to offset non-point source runoff is through an increase in agricultural best management practices. However, farmer decision making processes are complex and comprised of both economic and environmental goals, and farmers themselves are heterogeneous in their attitudes and beliefs that underlie these goals. As a result, it is difficult to predict what motivates farmers to adopt agricultural best management practices.
This seminar presents a farmer decision making model based on the results of a mail-back survey administered to 2000 farmers living in the Maumee watershed in Northwestern Ohio. The model attempts to explain the adoption of best management practices as a function of income, attitudes, beliefs, norms, perceived control, and risk perception.
The development of this model is important because behavioral models based on psychological theory are necessary to evaluate the potential costs and benefits of a particular policy. In addition, the efficacy of a policy depends on the behavioral response, and farmer decision making models to date have failed to account for heterogeneity in responses based on individual differences in behavioral attributes.
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