Organic food and farming is one of the few growth areas in the food system. In North America, consumer demand generally outstrips supply and many distributers, manufacturers and retailers are unable to source sufficient supply to meet customer requests. Yet, even in the presence of such demand and significant price premiums, conventional farmers are reluctant to convert to organic production. This has led many analysts (some of them discussed in this paper) to ask why adoption is so sluggish and how to speed it up.
Farmers express many reasons for adopting organic farming (Egri, 1999; Cranfield et al., 2010), but the adoption question goes beyond personal characteristics and motivations (Padel, 2001). Earlier studies (summarized by Parra-Lopez et al., 2007) attempted to identify the characteristics of organic adopters, implicitly or explicitly employing the Innovation-Diffusion model (see discussion of its limitations below). Other studies, more helpful in the context of our Agent Based Modelling (ABM) work, have identified a mix of farmer motivations and structural elements (sometimes referred to as exogenous factors) associated with transition, summarized by Padel (2008) and Sautereau (2009) as including: personal values and convictions about the environment, social equity and health, conversion of a neighbour, pressure from family members, health problems of family members and animals, avoiding chemicals, because of an accident, anticipating consumer demand, economic opportunities, overcoming regulatory constraints, and university training. It would appear that there are also major transition impediments. Symptomatic of these structural impediments, reviews undertaken on farmer behaviour towards conservation practice adoption have frequently highlighted the gap between positive attitude toward a conservation practice and more limited actual conversions (Reimer et al., 2012), highlighting the need to go beyond individual behaviour, attitudes and characteristics if accelerated adoption trajectories are an objective, as in this ABM work.
In this paper, we review the socio-economic literature on farm-scale adoption of organic farming, in an attempt to identify the driving and impeding forces at play. This work is part of a larger study modelling organic farming adoption in an Ontario, Canada sub-watershed (not reported here, see Ghaffari et al. submitted). This larger project uses agent-based modelling (ABM) to link watershed geospatial information with the larger forces that can influence a decision to undertake a transition, both individually and as a collective regional grouping of farmers. ABM is a means to model complex situations using simulated “agents” that interact with each other and with their environment based on a set of rules. In our work, an agent is a farmer or farm enterprise. To model complex coupled human-natural systems in this way requires a range of information, from soil types to costs of petrol to farmer responses to transition subsidies. Key to ABM is the linkages between agents that contribute to the spread of the phenomena under study, hence our priorizing exogenous factors driving transition. In other words, we are less concerned with the characteristics and motivations of those who adopt in the current environment, one characterized in Canada by minimal program and policy supports, and more concerned with reducing the structural obstacles that impede adoption. Using Acs et al. (2005) framework, our ABM scenarios are normative, optimizing and policy focused. What is the influence of neighbours’ experience with organic agriculture on the decision to convert? How do farmers respond to government transition subsidies or advisory services? Can such factors be parametized in a model? If certain kinds of policy and programme supports exist, will everyone in a subwatershed convert? To understand this, we must turn to the literature, since empirical data on such questions have not been collected in Ontario.
Our study hypothesizes that the “resistant non-adopter” identified by Morris and Potter (1995), the least likely to adopt in their 4-category scheme, will ultimately adopt in the right policy and programme environment. In other words, we structure our model to test whether the normal distribution adoption curve as proposed by Rogers (1995) will be altered by a strongly supportive environment. Equally important, can the policy/programme/network environment significantly accelerate the speed of adoption? This is admittedly challenging, given that many conventional growers are resistant to organic adoption for values/ideological reasons (for example 60% of conventional farmers in Darnhofer et al. [2005]) that may not be altered by the external environment. To support this work, in this paper we examine policy and programme initiatives that have successfully addressed these adoption barriers in other jurisdictions. This review, consequently, is somewhat selective. We first provide a broad overview of the issues and then focus on a much more limited set of studies that have attempted to attach numeric values, required for modelling, to factors influencing transition.
