Ajay Singh

Recent public health events have brought to the forefront the challenges of incorporating collective action behaviors and information seeking and processing behaviors to motivate personal protections to an environmental risk. The economic and social costs of large‐scale spread of disease when there is no cure for the disease, only preventative measures implemented in coordination and cooperation with others, will be effective at addressing the problem. To better understand these challenges in an agricultural context, we create an agent‐based model (ABM) coupling ecological, epidemiological, and economic factors to simulate Huanglongbing (HLB) spread in California. The ABM is used to evaluate how participation in collective action through coordinated area‐wide insecticide spraying is influenced by perception of other growers' participation and confidence in scientific information about the disease. We find a grower's participation in coordinated spraying has little influence on when the infection reaches them but depends primarily on the other growers' action. We discover that over time more growers cooperate in area‐wide coordinated spraying, but after the disease has sufficiently spread, some growers stop cooperating. Moreover, as beliefs in other growers' participation becomes stronger, some growers cooperate less, leading to greater HLB spread. We observe that increased confidence in scientific information lowers HLB spread, as more growers are motivated to cooperate through increased expected cumulative profits. As such, a successful strategy to combat an incurable infectious disease, like HLB, and collective action problems, in general, requires careful consideration of growers' perceptions of their neighbors' behavior and trust in scientific information.

Huanglongbing (HLB) is a disease that infects trees with the bacterium Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (CLas), which leads to fruit drop, yield reduction, and eventual death. HLB presents a significant threat to citrus production worldwide, jeopardizing its economic viability. There is currently no known cure for HLB. Past and current attempts at controlling the spread of HLB have primarily focused on spraying insecticides for Asian citrus psyllid (ACP) control, which vector CLas. Rogueing of infected trees has also been considered but has been largely abandoned given very limited effectiveness at curbing the spread of HLB. Recent research has examined the use of antibiotics, such as oxytetracycline (OTC), as potential solutions to mitigate HLB. OTC is a heat-tolerant member of the tetracycline class of antibiotics, which was first administrated through trunk injection as a pesticide for use in peaches in 1974. Our study evaluates the economic implications of OTC trunk injections as an HLB treatment in the event that a Navel orange grove in California was infected with HLB. We develop an empirical model to evaluate the effectiveness of OTC in reducing economic losses associated with HLB. The results show that the benefits of OTC treatment in terms of greater yields outweigh its cost but only when the high price of $23.29 USD per 37.5 lb box is observed. Furthermore, our model incorporates the use of insecticides in conjunction with OTC to evaluate the combined effects of these management and prevention strategies for HLB infections. Assuming the application of insecticides at an 80% efficiency in reducing the ACP population, profitability is first achieved in year 16 for average prices and yields, reaching $762.83 USD per acre. A scenario in which both prices and yields are high was also evaluated, in which the treatment becomes profitable in year 8 at every OTC efficiency. In the 20th year, cumulative discounted profits per acre are $107,278, $117,244, and $124,936 USD for low, average, and high OTC efficacy, respectively.

A large survey of corn farmers in twelve US midwestern states (n = 6849) was used to determine the role of multiple dimensions of uncertainty on prior experience with climate change, attitudes towards climate adaptation, and use of climate outlooks in agricultural decision-making. Epistemic uncertainty refers to a perception about the level of information about a phenomenon. Aleatoric uncertainty is a perception that a phenomenon occurs at random and no new information will reduce uncertainty while response uncertainty refers to the perception of the efficacy of an action to reduce a risk. Epistemic and response uncertainty explained a large portion of variance of farmers’ attitudes towards adaptation and their willingness to use weather and climate outlook tools. Aleatoric uncertainty however did not add or added only a small portion of variance explaining farmers’ attitudes climate adaptation or use of climate tools. Our results indicate that climate scientists should not treat farmers’ uncertainty as a monolithic concept, but instead embrace its multidimensionality. We also suggest that reception of expert-led presentations or tools that have a lot of modeling data, which are often layered with statistical uncertainty, can negatively influence farmers’ model uncertainty.

While conservation of natural resources on agricultural landscapes has been a priority for public agencies for more than 80 years, the ability of conservation planners to place conservation practices for enhanced environmental benefits remains elusive. To increase both adoption of conservation practices and efficient use of conservation funding, conservation planners are turning to decision support tools (DSTs), such as the Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework (ACPF). However, less is known about how DSTs facilitate a whole-landscape approach to conservation planning, and the strategies that are employed by conservation planners to engage with producers using new GIS-enabled planning technologies. With the goal of contributing to both the policy and practice of precision conservation, we present findings from semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with 21 conservation professionals in six watersheds in the US Midwest. Results suggest that the ACPF encourages conservation professionals to think at a watershed scale, supports their approach to conservation planning, and helps them in watershed planning and stakeholder engagement. Results also highlight the importance of conservation professionals employing a suite of strategies, such as being mindful of the scale of producer engagement (i.e., single farm vs community based) and accounting for producers' personalities, to create ‘enabling conditions’ for producer engagement when adopting a precision approach to conservation. Policy recommendations for precision conservation technologies include the need to streamline and expedite the process of conservation delivery, and that DSTs are a means to an end, but not a universal remedy, because conservation planning is most effective when localized interactions of rural landscapes and social dynamics are considered in an adaptive approach. •Decision support tools are a means to an end in conservation planning.•ACPF toolbox supports watershed-based and precision conservation planning.•Creating enabling conditions for producer engagement is important.•Precision conservation delivery requires skill of local staff to engage producers.

Response rates to mail-based surveys have declined in recent decades, and survey response rates for farmers tend to be low overall. Maintaining high response rates is necessary to prevent non-response bias. Historically, incentives have been an effective tool to increase response rates with general populations. However, the effect of incentives on farmers has not been well tested. In this study, we experimentally manipulated the use of a $2 incentive in two surveys targeted at farmers. We tested both the use of the incentive and the timing of incentive distribution in the survey process. We found the incentive significantly increased response rates with farmers but there was no significant effect of when the incentive was distributed. Additionally, we evaluated the cost-effectiveness of using the incentive. While the incentive increased response rate, the cost per survey response also increased and the cost of the incentive was not offset by the increased response rate.

•Crop advisers believe they have an intermediary role to play in installing and maintaining conservation practices.•Independent and retail-affiliated crop advisers hold divergent views on their respective roles to delivering conservation information.•Difficulties in collaboration between crop advisers and government agencies prevent crop advisers from promoting conservation policies and programs.•Future policies must more explicitly address whether and how CAs’ conservation contributions are incentivized, compensated, and/or overseen. Federal agricultural land use policies in the United States aimed at protecting soil health and water quality typically rely on persuading individual farmers to voluntarily adopt conservation practices. An expanding body of literature suggests that private sector intermediaries, such as crop advisers, are increasingly trusted sources of information for farmers about conservation practices and thus may be persuasive actors in the conservation-adoption realm. While previous studies have explored farmers’ perceptions of crop advisers facilitating conservation practice adoption and participating in conservation programs in agricultural landscapes, little research to date has explored crop advisers’ perceptions of this role, and few agricultural land use policies have explicitly included crop advisers as conservation partners. This study fills a critical void in the literature by evaluating the Saginaw Bay Regional Conservation Partnership Program, an innovative agricultural policy that relies on crop advisers to recruit farmers into the program and assist them with the adoption of conservation practices. Through a survey and interviews with crop advisers in the Saginaw Bay watershed in Michigan, USA, we explore crop advisers’ perceptions of their role in the program and of delivering conservation information to farmers. We found that crop advisers have positive attitudes towards land/water resources and conservation practices, believe they have an important intermediary role to play in facilitating conservation practice adoption, and believe their supervisors are supportive of them promoting conservation. However, difficulties in collaboration and communication between the private and governmental sectors – resulting from perceived differences, operational differences, and territoriality – present a key barrier to crop advisers increasing their intermediary role in the promotion and implementation of federal conservation programs. Future research and policy initiatives should explore how to address public-private territoriality and whether crop advisers should be incentivized to deliver information about conservation practices and/or assist in enrolling farmers in federal conservation programs.