Exploring how farmers’ perceptions of soil health affect their management decisions (preliminary data and future plans)
As part of the Soil Health Nexus Digital Cafe Series, Tayler Ulbrich, a graduate student researcher at Michigan State University, presents “Exploring how farmers’ perceptions of soil health affect their management decisions (preliminary data and future plans)”. This presentation was originally broadcast on June 3, 2020.
Despite widespread interest in soil health among farmers, adoption of soil health practices is low. This project seeks to describe how farmers’ understanding of soil health, or mental models, influence their management decisions and can inform agricultural advisors’ outreach and training activities. For the Soil Health Digital Cafe Series we present preliminary data about farmers’ soil health views and practice adoption collected from a survey across 4 states in 2018. We also discuss and look for feedback on upcoming projects, including interviews and a workshop, where we hope to gain a deeper understanding of farmers’ soil health perceptions and, further, learn how these perceptions could inform agricultural Extension and outreach activities.
Main Presentation
I was very impressed!! So many times we trot out our new ideas and think if we force feed them to our audience we will get buy in. Our speaker pointed out you need to understand how they process information to see how that might fit their management system. We need to get inside of their heads to see how they would move to trying something once to using soil health ideas more of the time. This is a lot different than I learned 40 years ago in a rural sociology course.