Adoption of nutrient management practices

Abstract

Off-farm income has recently been incorporated into the analysis of technology adoption, due to its increasing share in total farm household income in the U.S. Previous studies, however, found inconsistent results with respect to the impact of off-farm income on adoption of conservation practices. The contribution of the current study is to provide a conceptual model which shows that off-farm work has positive impact on adoption of capital incentive practices and negative impact on adoption labor intensive technologies. The results of multivariate probit regression confirms that adoption of injecting manure into the soil, which is a capital intensive practice, is positively and significantly impacted by off-farm work. However, adoption of record keeping, which is a labor intensive practice, is not negatively impacted by off-farm work. The current study also investigated whether insights from previous studies that analyzed primarily profit-oriented practices can be used when designing policies for conserving the environment, which is another contribution of the current study to the literature. The results from probit regressions show that there are some factors such as education and farm sales impact adoption of both types of practices in the same way, but there are also factors such as off-farm income that do not impact adoption of environment-oriented practices.