Doctoral Dissertation Research: What drives sustainable agriculture? Understanding how plural values influence farmers' transition to organic farming

The current dominant model of agriculture achieves high yields due to the intense use of fertilizers and the adoption of mono-cultures. This dominant agricultural model, however, has contributed to social and environmental problems including biodiversity loss, increasing economic heterogeneity, and communities increasingly vulnerable to diseases, drought, floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters.

Incentivizing the adoption of more sustainable agriculture practices would require a shift in farm rules. Most rules tend to disregard the environmental values that shape farmers' behavior (e.g., care and stewardship), and often focus solely on self-interested motivations (e.g., profit, productivity) at the expense of other values that may be important to farmers who hold a diversity of perspectives.

Decision makers often struggle to address the diverse range of values that motivates farmers. For example, some farmers are mainly motivated to adopt sustainable agricultural practices because they see it as a market strategy, while others are driven by concerns with consumers’ health. This research project recognizes the different values that drive farmers’ behavior to identify the best instruments to incentivize sustainable agriculture.

To identify the values that motivate the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and how these values can be incorporated into rule design, the research team conducts case studies in the capital and one of the larger agricultural states. Brazil is leader in adopting rules that aim to incentivize new models of environmentally friendly agroecological production.

This research is a multi-layered analysis through reviewing documents and interviewing stakeholders and farmers to ascertain how governance functions across institutional levels from national rules to local implementation and how values are translated across these levels. By identifying farmers' values and how they are aligned or not with rules, this research provides insight into how rules can better reflect farmers’ values and thus motivate more widespread adoption of sustainable agriculture practices.

Although Brazil is the testbed, the findings are relevant to other nations with similar agro-ecosystems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.