Farm service agency employee intentions to use weather and climate data in professional services

Abstract

Agricultural service providers often work closely with producers, and are well positioned to include weather and climate change information in the services they provide. By doing so, they can help producers reduce risks due to climate variability and change. A national survey of United States Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency (FSA) field staff (n = 4621) was conducted in 2016. The survey was designed to assess FSA employees’ use of climate and weather-related data and explore their perspectives on climate change, attitudes toward adaptation and concerns regarding climate- and weather-driven risks. Two structural equation models were developed to explore relationships between these factors, and to predict respondents’ willingness to integrate climate and weather data into their professional services in the future. The two models were compared with assess the relative influence of respondents’ current use of weather and climate information. Findings suggest that respondents’ perceptions of weather-related risk in combination with their personal observations of weather variability help predict whether an individual intends to use weather and climate information in the future. Importantly, climate change belief is not a significant predictor of this intention; however, the belief that producers will have to adapt to climate change in order to remain viable is. Surprisingly, whether or not an individual currently uses weather and climate information is not a good predictor of whether they intend to in the future. This suggests that there are opportunities to increase employee exposure and proficiency with weather and climate information to meet the needs of American farmers by helping them to reduce risk.

U.S. Inland Pacific Northwest Wheat Farmers’ Perceived Risks: Motivating Intentions to Adapt to Climate Change?

“…This aligns with previous research that found that Midwestern farmers' current use of conservation practices, also categorized as adaptation BMPs, are a good indicator of what farmers intend on doing in the future [15]. However, other research suggests that historical behavior is not always the most important indicator of behavioral intentions or realized behavioral change [66,67].…”

Just don’t call it climate change: climate-skeptic farmer adoption of climate-mitigative practices

“…First, a sizable proportion of farmers have already adopted climate-mitigative practices. They are motivated to do so for many reasons, but neither agreement with climate science, nor an ascription of responsibility for mitigation, are among the motivators, a finding that departs from several other studies identifying climate change beliefs as a strong predictor of adoption [9,29,41] (beliefs that climate change is human caused have been found to be relatively less significant in studies of adaptation behaviours [47]). Rather, farmers recognize numerous co-benefits of mitigative practices, such as soil quality improvement, and wildlife and biodiversity enhancement.…”

Assessing perceptions of climate risk and adaptation among small farmers in Oregon's Willamette Valley

“…These reported beliefs in climate change were higher than among similar studies of farmers conducted in other parts of the USA (Prokopy et al ., 2015; Chatrchyan et al ., 2017). Additionally, previous research makes a connection between these climate beliefs and support for climate action (Howden et al ., 2007; Arbuckle et al ., 2013; Hyland et al ., 2016; Chatrchyan et al ., 2017) suggesting that as belief in anthropogenic climate change increases, so does support for adaptive and mitigative action, although this trend is not always supported in the literature (Schattman et al ., 2018 a , 2018 b ).…”

“…Fifty-two per cent of these respondents indicated that they have already taken action to respond to climate change on their farms. It is clear that farmers from other parts of the country are also beginning to take action in response to climate change (Jemison et al ., 2014; White et al ., 2018; Schattman et al ., 2018 b ) and many farmers anticipate taking action in response to projected changes (Haden et al ., 2012; Niles et al ., 2016; Roesch-McNally, 2018; Roesch-McNally et al ., 2019).…”