Measuring Strategic, Tactical, Complex and Simple Changes to Farm Systems

Agriculture is under increasing pressure to redesign farm systems. Governments are increasingly seeking to halt or reverse the damaging effects of agriculture on the environment. Adapting to climate change requires reconfiguring farm systems to withstand more variable, and historically more extreme, seasonal conditions and the constant demand to increase productivity continues unabated. Meeting these pressures is thought to require a combination of responses ranging from incremental adjustments to farm systems through to their complete transformation into entirely new enterprises. Implementing each of these entails different resources, time horizons, skills, knowledge and planning, and this has corresponding consequences for any government or industry policies intended to promote adoption or compliance. Previously, we described a novel approach to classifying changes to farm systems as a framework for inferring the nature of the resources, skills, knowledge, planning and time needed to implement the different types of change on farms. We provided illustrative examples of each type of change and discussed the implications for extension, agricultural and environmental policy, and policy regarding adaptation to climate change. In this paper, we statistically test the predictive accuracy of our classification approach using survey data on the adoption of four environmentally beneficial practices by livestock farmers in New Zealand. We found statistically significant and substantial differences across the four types of change (strategic, tactical, complex and simple) in the proportion of farmers adopting each of the practices. We also found significant and strong associations between the types of change, learning effort and decision effort. The results reinforce the importance for industry and government in understanding and acknowledging that heterogeneity in farm systems translates into heterogeneity in adoption processes, with consequent implications for the effective policy support of adaptation.