"While agriculture is of the utmost importance to human societies for its production of food and fiber (and increasingly fuel), it is also a source of environmental harm as a producer of nonpoint-source pollution to the air and water. Even though efforts to control agricultural nonpoint-source pollution have focused on encouraging farmers to voluntarily use practices that will better keep soil and nutrients on farms, agriculture remain a substantial source of water pollution in the US. This has led to continued efforts to better understand why farmers choose to use these best management practices (BMPs) so that incentives can be improved. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on farmer decision-making related to the use of soil, water, and nutrient conserving BMPs in row-crop agriculture in the US Midwest, with particular interest in the importance of the roles of knowledge and the biophysical environment. Conceptually, my dissertation is informed and organized by a theory of action, in which purposive individual actions cumulatively create system-level effects. This is done by analyzing data at the individual, county, and state scales as well as across-scales in three empirical chapters." -- Abstract.
Read
