Eco-friendly ag practices may be easier than farmers think

Rotating crops, using compost, adding cover crops and flower strips, and reducing tillage are practices that can make farms resilient to climate change and bring environmental benefits, but Cornell researchers have found a culprit for low adoption of these interventions in the U.S.: farmers perceive that the practices increase labor more than they actually do.

In the study, published Oct. 24 in Agriculture and Human Values, researchers surveyed more than 500 fruit and vegetable farmers nationally and conducted in-depth interviews with nearly 50 farmers in New York and California. Farmers named three aspects of labor - cost, time and complexity - as the main barriers to using seven out of eight agroecological practices - practices that leverage ecological processes to improve agriculture and benefit the environment. Farmers who had never used the practices perceived greater labor requirements than those who had used them.

"When people talk about agroecological practices, they often assume it's not really viable in the U.S. context," said second author Rachel Bezner Kerr, professor of global development in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). "This paper really shows that actually it is possible for American farmers to use these practices and that the barriers are lower than they may have thought."

The authors, including researchers from The Nature Conservancy, said the study underlines a need for more farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing to help dispel myths and increase the use of agroecological practices.

"When you look around the world at how agroecology is operationalized, and how it really thrives, it's often based on a social component which is underdeveloped in the U.S.," said first author Jeff Liebert, Ph.D. '22, now at the University of British Columbia. "Agroecology is really about context-specific, place-based solutions, and there are a lot of opportunities to help develop local, farmer-led movements and to find ways to support farmers connecting with one another."

The authors write that the eight practices included in the survey - the use of compost, reduced tillage, intercropping of different plants, flower strips, crop rotations, cover cropping and border plantings - generally do require more complex management, although researchers have found the practices can pay for themselves through increased productivity. The interventions also support biodiversity, and can improve water and air quality, and lower emissions and susceptibility to flooding and drought.

"There's robust scientific evidence that these practices can build resilience for farms to climate impacts," said Bezner Kerr, who said she was even more convinced of this after serving on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "I think that's an important message - that it's beneficial as a society that we have these practices incorporated, but it's also beneficial to the farm and their stable income and ability to maintain production."

The researchers found that adoption of the practices lagged particularly on large farms, which control the vast majority of farmland in the U.S.; farmers of larger operations reported more intense and often systemic labor challenges, including scarcity of farm workers and greater pressure from state-specific minimum wage increases. They were also more likely to pursue mechanization.

"There's a bigger question here about the type of world we're moving towards and the types of potential solutions we're willing to grapple with," Liebert said. "If we replace humans with machines, it forecloses the potential pathway to farm work that's really meaningful and dignified."

Taking into account the complexities of labor challenges for farms of different sizes could improve efforts to promote an agroecological movement in the U.S., the authors write. Liebert also said there should be more conversation around the broader effects of non-agricultural policies and how they can make investing in labor more difficult - especially for farmers who feel squeezed by market demands for "cheap" food.

"Fast-forward 10 years from now," he said, "you may have a lot fewer farm workers engaged in agriculture because farmers have shifted to greater mechanization and simplified farming systems, which could reshape rural communities and perpetuate numerous environmental issues."

In interviews with farmers, often lasting more than several hours, sometimes over meals, Liebert found that's not necessarily the future farmers want.

"I met many people who care a lot about feeding people and trying to protect their workers, but there are all of these structural factors that are out of their control," said Liebert. "This type of research really gives you a much better, deeper sense of the complicated landscape in which farmers are making these decisions."

Additional co-authors include Alison Power, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Arts and Sciences and CALS; Matthew Ryan, professor of soil and crop sciences in the School of Integrative Plant Science (CALS); and Sasha Gennet and Abigail Hart from The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

The study was supported by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability as part of its joint research program and 12-year partnership with The Nature Conservancy.