Conservation Tillage in California's Central Valley: Understanding Adoption Barriers to Enhance Extension Education.

Although conservation tillage (CT) systems have been developed and recently implemented on farms in California’s Central Valley (CV), overall adoption in the region has been slow.   The disconnect between demonstration and adoption of successful CT systems has highlighted the need to examine barriers to further expansion of CT in the CV. Two methods were used to understand these barriers.   A mail survey was sent to 2500 tomato, cotton and silage farmers and related professionals (returned by 307 farmers and 95 non-farmers) and analyzed with quantitative methods. The survey included questions considering attitudes toward CT, preferred information sources, farm and farmer demographics and a written response question (answered by 243 farmers) asking “Why do/don’t you use CT?”  Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven farmers to better understand CV farmer perspectives. Farmer interviews were examined using open-coded constant comparative analysis (Corbin and Strauss, 1998).  The most common reason found for non-adoption was “CT won’t work for my crops” or on my particular farm.  Adopters indicated that CT required a full shift in mindset, characterized by farmers conducting observation and experimentation to develop new management approaches for CT.  Adopters and CT professionals say that without developing new approaches for water, weed and residue management during the CT transition, crop failure or yield reduction can be experienced. Failure could lead a farmer to determine that CT doesn’t work in their situation.   Farmers who do not use CT indicate that the amount of change required to transition to CT is too large when they have systems that are currently working.  This research highlights the need for extension to demonstrate the range of systems where CT is already working, to better document the new management approaches used in CT and to address risks associated with the CT transition.