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1. Factors affecting farmer perceived challenges towards precision agriculture

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11119-023-10048-2  

   Wang, Tong ; Jin, Hailong ; Sieverding, Heidi L. ( December 2023 , Precision Agriculture)

   Precision Agriculture (PA) manages field heterogeneities and enables informed site-specific management. While PA helps improve farming efficiency and profitability, challenges prior to and following PA adoption can prevent many farmers from widely using it. This paper aims to understand producers’ challenge perceptions using 1119 survey responses from U.S. Midwest farmers. The majority (59%) of respondents have adopted at least one PA technology, while the minority (14%) had not adopted any PA technologies. Cost (equipment and service fee), brand compatibility, and data privacy concerns topped other concerns from the average producer’s point of view. Among all producers, 60% regarded PA equipment and service fee as too high, followed by 50% who viewed brand compatibility and data privacy as their major concerns. Producers at more advanced adoption stage indicated reduced concerns in most categories. Yet, there were similar concerns towards data privacy issue regardless of the adoption status. Furthermore, brand compatibility issue is more of a concern for adopters than for non-adopters. Estimation results from partial proportional odds (PPO) models show that factors that frequently affect producers’ perceived challenges include adoption status, cropland acres, age, education, information sources, farming goals, soil characteristics, and region variables. Findings from this study can aid PA stakeholders in identifying target groups, tailoring future development, research, and outreach efforts, and ultimately promoting efficient PA usage on a broader scale. 

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2. Parity as radical pragmatism: Centering farm justice and agrarian expertise in agricultural policy

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2023.1066465  

   Graddy-Lovelace, Garrett ; Krikorian, Jacqueline ; Jewett, Andrea ; Vivekanandan, Avinash ; Stahl, Katherine ; Singh, Indra Shekhar ; Wilson, Brad ; Naylor, Patti ; Naylor, George ; Pennick, Edward Jerry ( March 2023 , Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems)

   Rather than treating symptoms of a destructive agri-food system, agricultural policy, research, and advocacy need both to address the root causes of dysfunction and to learn from longstanding interventions to counter it. Specifically, this paper focuses on agricultural parity policies – farmer-led, government-enacted programs to secure a price floor and manage supply to prevent the economic and ecological devastation of unfettered corporate agro-capitalism. Though these programs remain off the radar in dominant policy, scholarship, and civil society activism, but in the past few years, vast swaths of humanity have mobilized in India to call for agri-food systems transformation through farmgate pricing and market protections. This paper asks what constitutes true farm justice and how it could be updated and expanded as an avenue for radically reimagining agriculture and thus food systems at large. Parity refers to both a pricing ratio to ensure livelihood, but also a broader farm justice movement built on principles of fair farmgate prices and cooperatively coordinated supply management. The programs and principles are now mostly considered “radical,” deemed inefficient, irrelevant, obsolete, and grievous government overeach—but from the vantage, we argue, of a system that profits from commodity crop overproduction and agroindustry consolidation. However, by examining parity through a producer-centric lens cognizant of farmers‘ ability, desire, and need to care for the land, ideas of price protection and supply coordination become foundational, so that farmers can make a dignified livelihood stewarding land and water while producing nourishing food. This paradox—that an agricultural governance principle can seem both radical and common sense, far-fetched and pragmatic—deserves attention and analysis. As overall numbers of farmers decline in Global North contexts, their voices dwindle from these conversations, leaving space for worldviews favoring de-agrarianization altogether. In Global South contexts maintaining robust farming populations, such policies for deliberate de-agrarianization bely an aggression toward rural and peasant ways of life and land tenure. Alongside the history of parity programs, principles, and movements in U.S., the paper will examine a vast version of a parity program in India – the Minimum Support Price (MSP) system, which Indian farmers defended and now struggle to expand into a legal right. From East India to the plains of the United States and beyond, parity principles and programs have the potential to offer a pragmatic direction for countering global agro-industrial corporate capture, along with its de-agrarianization, and environmental destruction. The paper explores what and why of parity programs and movements, even as it addresses the complexity of how international parity agreements would unfold. It ends with the need for global supply coordination grounded in food sovereignty and solidarity, and thus the methodological urgency of centering farm justice and agrarian expertise. 

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3. Understanding farmer views of precision agriculture profitability in the U.S. Midwest

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.107950  

   Wang, Tong ; Jin, Hailong ; Sieverding, Heidi ; Kumar, Sandeep ; Miao, Yuxin ; Rao, Xudong ; Obembe, Oladipo ; Mirzakhani Nafchi, Ali ; Redfearn, Daren ; Cheye, Stephen ( November 2023 , Ecological Economics)

   Precision Agriculture (PA) technologies are well known to be useful in addressing field heterogeneities and enabling informed site-specific management decisions. While profitability is the foremost factor considered by farmers when making PA adoption decisions, information in this regard is lacking from the farmers' perspective. This paper analyzed 1119 farmer responses from a 2021 survey conducted in four states along the western margins of the U.S. Midwest. Our findings show that while most (around 60%) non-adopters indicate that they are unaware of PA profit change, adopters are likely to rate a major profit increase. About two thirds of adopters rated at least a 5% increase in profitability towards variable rate (VR) fertilizer application (72%), VR seed application (68%), and automatic section control (66%). We modeled farmers' profit change subsequent to PA adoptions. Our regression results demonstrate that the profits from PA usage increase over time and that use of conservation practices likely influences PA profitability in a positive way. As soil quality and weather factors also affect profit ratings, it would be beneficial to compare and demonstrate profitability potential of various PA technologies on a regional basis and tailor the promotion efforts to farmers most likely to benefit from them. 

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4. Farmer perceived challenges toward conservation practice usage in the margins of the Corn Belt, USA

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742170523000042  

   Adhikari, Ram Kumar ; Wang, Tong ; Jin, Hailong ; Ulrich-Schad, Jessica D. ; Sieverding, Heidi L. ; Clay, David ( January 2023 , Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems)

   While conservation practices promote soil health and reduce the negative environmental effects from agricultural production, their adoption rates are generally low. To facilitate farmer adoption, we carried out a survey to identify potential challenges faced by farmers regarding conservation tillage and cover crop adoption in the western margin of the US Corn Belt. We found farmers' top two concerns regarding conservation tillage were delayed planting, caused by slow soil warming in spring, and increased dependence on herbicide and fungicides. Narrow planting window and lack of time/labor were perceived by farmers as the two primary challenges for cover crop adoption. Some sense of place factors, including the commonly included dimensions of attachment, identity and dependence, played a role in farmers' perceived challenges. For example, respondents more economically dependent on farming perceived greater challenges. We found that farmers' challenge perceptions regarding reduced yield and lack of time/labor significantly decreased as years of usage increased, implying that time and experience could dilute some challenges faced by farmers. Our findings indicate that social network use, technical guidance and economic subsidies are likely to address the concerns of farmers and facilitate their adoption of conservation practices.

    

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5. Understanding farmers’ engagement and barriers to machine learning‐based intelligent agricultural decision support systems

   https://doi.org/10.1002/agj2.21358  

   Adereti, Damilola Tobiloba ; Gardezi, Maaz ; Wang, Tong ; McMaine, John ( June 2023 , Agronomy Journal)

   The use of intelligent decision support systems (DSS) in precision farming provides an opportunity to improve agricultural recommendations and reduce the impacts of agriculture on the environment. Despite the benefits offered by DDS, many farmers remain skeptical of using these hardware and software tools, and their adoption rates have remained low. A survey of 312 South Dakota farmers examined the barriers and opportunities for their engagement with DSS. Exploratory factor analysis was used to analyze 13 Likert scale survey items that probed farmers’ concerns about DSS. Factor loadings indicated that farmers’ concerns are related to high cost, insufficient knowledge, lack of confidence, and cyber security and privacy. A latent profile analysis (LPA) method was used to classify respondents into profiles or groups based on their dimensions of concerns (cost, knowledge, confidence, and security). Results of the LPA revealed that the sample of farmers could be grouped into four distinct profiles that ranged from low to high confidence in the use of DSS for agronomic decision‐making. Giving attention to farmer comfort/concern profiles allows for a more inclusive and better targeted engagement with farmers and potentially increase the adoption of PA. This knowledge can be vital for technology developers, policymakers, and extension services who are keen to promote PA usage among large‐, medium‐, and small‐scale farmers in the United States.

    

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