SEA Working Paper 98/02
Landcare and the Adoption of Sustainable Farming Systems
David J. Pannell
Agricultural and Resource Economics, The University of W.A., Nedlands, 6907
Abstract
It is argued that there are three broad conditions that are necessary for an individual farmer to adopt a farming-system innovation: awareness of the innovation, perception that it is feasible and worthwhile to trial the innovation, and perception that the innovation promotes the farmer’s objectives. Challenges involved in meeting each of these conditions are discussed, with particular attention to long-term or "sustainable" farming practices. Insights from these discussions are used to suggest the particular types of approaches to Landcare extension are most likely to contribute to positive outcomes.
Introduction
The National Landcare Program started with the premise that land degradation in agriculture could be solved by awareness-raising and education programs for farmers (Curtis and De Lacy, 1997; Vanclay, 1992, 1997). It apparently was believed that viable solutions and sufficient information about them already exist, so the problem must lie with farmers’ ignorance and conservatism. It has taken a long time for the fundamental errors in this view to be widely recognised but this recognition does at last seem to be increasing. An aim of this paper is to present a more realistic and comprehensive description of what it takes to achieve widespread adoption of sustainable farming practices. A second aim is to put Landcare in context relative to other possible approaches to promotion of sustainable practices. This is important to encourage a more realistic appreciation of what can and cannot be expected of an extension program such as Landcare and to help target activities to those most likely to make a difference.
Implicit in the following discussion is an assumption that the farming practices which would be optimal from the point of view of society as a whole are not adopted as widely or as rapidly as society would prefer when the issue is left solely to the free market. In practice in a democracy it is not in society’s power to directly select a sustainable integrated farming system, because it is not possible to simply order farmers to adopt the chosen system. Rather we are constrained by the effectiveness of the various tools that can be used to encourage adoption. The farming system that comes into existence will be that which results from farmers’ reactions to the government policies and institutions in place (Hollick, 1990; Pannell 1997), one of which is the National Landcare Program.
There is a wealth of empirical evidence on the factors that influence farmers’ adoption of innovations (e.g. Feder and Umali 1993; Feder et al. 1985; Lindner 1987), and it includes some very clear-cut messages. Unfortunately, responding to these messages is often not straightforward. We can identify the conditions necessary to achieve adoption of an agricultural innovation but it remains difficult to meet the conditions.
The next section is an outline of the conditions for adoption of an agricultural innovation. Thereafter these conditions are reviewed in more detail and the specific challenges for adoption of sustainable farming systems are identified. Then, the potential for Landcare or other types of Government programs to help meet these challenges is discussed. The paper concludes with suggestions about which particular types of activities in Landcare are likely to be of greatest benefit in pursuit of a more sustainable agriculture.
The Conditions for Adoption of an Agricultural Innovation
It is important to recognise that a new farming system is an innovation from the point of view of farmers. They are likely to come to any innovation with scepticism, uncertainty, prejudices and preconceptions and with an existing farming system that may or may not be operating as they would wish, but is at least operating. Unless they are new to farming, they will have trialed other innovations in the past and concluded that at least some of them fell far short of the claims made for them. They will be particularly wary of a system that is radically different from that with which they are familiar and comfortable. They will almost certainly hold an attitude that the people advocating such a radical system do not understand the realities of farming, or at least of their farm.
In getting past this initial set of attitudes and beliefs, there are several specific hurdles which must be overcome. The following sub-sections describe the states of farmer awareness or knowledge which must be achieved.
Awareness of the innovation
In this context, "awareness" means not just awareness that an innovation exists, but awareness that it is potentially of practical relevance to the farmer. Reaching this point of awareness is a trigger which prompts the farmer to open his or her ears and eyes - to begin noting and collecting information about the innovation in order to inform their decision about whether or not to go to the next step of trialing the innovation.
Perception that it is feasible and worthwhile to trial the innovation
There is strong evidence that, the world over, most farmers are "risk-averse" (Antle 1987; Bardsley and Harris 1987; Myers 1989; Pluske and Fraser 1996). This is evident from the observation that they will not leap into large-scale adoption of a new innovation. Rather, they generally employ small-scale trials, adjusting the scale either upwards towards full adoption or downwards towards disadoption as they gain knowledge and confidence in their perceptions about its performance.
Conducting a trial incurs costs of time, energy, finance and land that could be used productively for other purposes. To be willing to trial an innovation, the farmer’s perceptions of it must be sufficiently positive to believe that there is a reasonable chance of adopting the innovation in the long run. It is not necessary for the innovation to be thought to be better than current practice, because the farmer realises that the results of a trial may revise his or her perceptions upwards. However, it cannot be too much worse or the chance of recovering the cost of the trial through later productivity improvements will be too low.
This trial phase is very important, perhaps the most important phase in determining final adoption or disadoption. If small-scale trials are not possible or not enlightening for some reason, the chances of widespread adoption are greatly diminished. This is because farmers will be very unlikely to leap to full-scale adoption due to the real risk that the innovation will prove a full-scale failure. This risk of failure should be viewed as part of the cost of gaining high quality information about the innovation. Clearly, the larger the scale of the trial that is necessary, the larger is the cost of this information, and the less likely the farmer is to make the investment in trialing.
Perception that the innovation promotes the farmer’s objectives
Lindner (1987) in a wide-ranging review of the adoption and diffusion literature concluded that the objectives of individual farmers figure centrally in the adoption and diffusion process. He found that,
"there is compelling empirical support for this emerging consensus that the final decision to adopt or reject is consistent with the producer’s self interest." (p. 148)
"Self interest" in this context is considerably broader than merely "profit". It may, for example, include objectives related to risk, leisure and environmental protection. Nevertheless, profit is a particularly important element of "self-interest". Indeed, the available evidence indicates that although the speed of uptake of innovations is influenced by a range of factors (including social and demographic factors), the final level of uptake seems to depend primarily on economic factors (e.g. Marsh et al. 1995). There is also strong evidence that even for innovations oriented towards resource conservation, economic considerations are the most important determinants of actual adoption decisions (Cary and Wilkinson 1997; Sinden and King 1990). Much has been made of the need to promote an ethic of stewardship among farmers, but based on statistical analysis of actual farmer behaviour Sinden and King (1990) concluded that,
"While the stewardship motivation and personal factors encourage perception and recognition of a problem, economic factors promote actual adoption." (p. 179)
In a similar vein, Cary and Wilkinson (1997) found that,
"Generally, the best way to increase the use of conservation practices to overcome land degradation … will be to ensure the practices are economically profitable." (p. 20)
The finding that self-interest (broadly defined) drives adoption decisions has strong implications for sustainability-related issues in agriculture. It is likely that some farmers will respond somewhat to perceived social pressures or community expectations, but in aggregate this tendency will be swamped by the pursuit of self-interest. If the existing technologies being promoted are not sufficiently profitable (or more generally beneficial), we must either develop new technologies, or make the existing technologies more attractive through such means as subsidies, tax concessions or, in the extreme, taxes or legal penalties for non-adoption.
The use of the terms "awareness" and "perceptions" in the headings above highlights that these are social and economic issues. Of course they are influenced very much by biological and physical factors, as well as other socioeconomic factors, in ways which are discussed in later sections outlining the specific challenges to meeting the conditions for adoption.
Barriers, hills, bicycles and incentives
The term "barrier to adoption" is widely used. It seems to imply that each barrier is a totally impenetrable impediment and that all barriers to adoption must be overcome before adoption will occur.
However, the "barriers" concept is often an unhelpful way of thinking about the problem of low adoption. The way of thinking that I am advocating here is that there are factors that provide a disincentive to adoption and factors that provide an incentive to adoption and the actual adoption decision depends on whether the farmer perceives that the positives in total exceed the negatives in total. A particular innovation may have substantial drawbacks but as long as it also has large enough benefits it will be adopted. For example, in Western Australia there is frustration among some farmers about the low yields achieved with lupin crops in some years, but they are still grown because of the benefits they provide to subsequent cereal crops.
A better analogy than "barriers" is to think of a farmer’s adoption decision as being the decision of whether to cycle up a hill. The reward from adoption is the view from the top of the hill, but the farmer is not sure how good the view is. The negative aspects of an innovation combine to produce a hill of a certain steepness, the positive factors combine to determine the quality of the view, and the farmer’s resources correspond to the cyclist’s cycle and leg muscle power. Other aspects of the adoption process can be nicely considered in this analogy:
The last two points are perhaps reasonably thought of as "barriers", but I believe that the "adoption hill" analogy is more generally applicable, capturing more aspects and complexities of the adoption decision.
The Challenges in Raising Awareness
There is little empirical evidence about the rate at which farmers become aware of new innovations but what evidence there is would be of serious concern to anyone wishing for rapid adoption. Gibbs et al. (1987) asked a group of farmers in South Australia to record in their diaries when they became aware of any new innovations. The researchers found that the time lag for awareness varied markedly. For many farmers it amounted to years despite the presence of extension activities designed specifically to raise awareness.
The Challenges in Making a Trial Feasible/Worthwhile
One element of "trialability" is the size of trial that is necessary. As noted earlier, the larger this is, the less likely the farmer is to make the investment in trialing. In this regard, there may be particular cause for concern about systems based on use of trees to increase water use. Such a system clearly would require a minimum scale for its effects to be apparent.
The farmer must have the resources to be able to conduct a trial. For example, in a recent survey of Western Australian farmers we found that there was a positive relationship between a farmer having extra labour on the farm and the probability that they are conducting trials of new grain legumes. Without access to relatively high levels of labour, the cost of the time the farmer must give up to sow the trial is too high, primarily because sowing the trial coincides with sowing of the main, money-earning crop.
Another requirement for a trial to be worthwhile is for the results of the trial to be observable; there is no value in the trial otherwise. In terms of direct, saleable output from the system, this is usually not a problem. However if a significant part of the benefits of a system stem from reductions in resource degradation or other such indirect benefits, the issue of observability can be critical.
Many degradation processes are slow relative to the time frames used for most management decision making (e.g. dryland salinisation, soil acidification). In evaluating a trial, one requires the degradation to be continued under the old farming system for long enough for differences under the new farming system to become apparent. Historical degradation is not useful for this. Observation commences with the trial of the new system. Obviously, the slower the degradation process, the longer it will take to be convinced about differences in degradation rates. Unfortunately there are additional factors which further delay the confident recognition of any such difference. They include:
These sources of variability are overlaid on the trial, and so their impacts are confounded with any effect attributable to the new farming system. Spatial variation is always an issue for interpretation of trials, but the combination of variation in space and time which affects observations of long-term trends in soil degradation makes them particularly difficult to interpret. At the very least, they increase the duration of the trial necessary to reach confident conclusions. In the extreme, they may mean that a trial could never be conclusive. In either case, the prospective benefits of conducting a trial are reduced, potentially by so much that it is not worth conducting a trial.
Can we not circumvent this problem by telling the farmer about the impacts of the new system? Unfortunately, this is not sufficient. As noted earlier, farmers are wary of outside experts telling them what is best for them. In general, this wariness is well-founded. It is more difficult than most realise to recognise and account correctly for the many subtle and interacting factors that determine the impact of a technology on any individual farmer’s welfare. An obvious example is advice based on biological or physical considerations, without adequate attention to economics. In general, farmers will not believe what we tell them they should do. They have to see results for themselves to be convinced. Highly credible information sources, such as respected individuals, will help to promote trialing of an innovation, but their advice will not almost never be accepted as a substitute for a trial.
A practical demonstration on another farmer’s property can be convincing, but even then the farmer will not be convinced if the demonstration is in a situation that is too different from his or her own situation. Farmers are understandably wary that results from a remote trial may not apply to them. This could be due to factors such as soil differences, topography, labour, scale, or machinery. Indeed, bioeconomic modelling shows that the optimal farm management strategy is often highly sensitive to differences in these factors.
Lindner et al. (1982) demonstrated the importance of distance to information source as a determinant of adoption, showing that farmer adoption of a particular innovation (trace-element fertilizers) decreased with increasing distance from the office of the department of agriculture. This is likely to be due in part to farmer perceptions about the information’s local relevance.
The Challenges in Meeting Farmers’ Objectives
Making the system technically sound
A fundamental challenge is to ensure that the system is, in fact, technically sound. Does it in fact deliver with sufficient reliability the biological and physical benefits being sought? Unfortunately, in some cases we may wish to promote a system before we have comprehensive scientific evidence about its effectiveness. Salinity in low to medium rainfall areas of Western Australia is a case in point. We know in general that establishment of perennials are likely to help reduce the rate of rise in the saline water table. However we have limited capacity to give advice on where in the landscape and at what density on a particular farm a given number of trees should be planted to maximise their impact on the water table. Nevertheless, salinity is perceived to be a major threat, so tree planting is widely endorsed and promoted. It is true that many trees have been planted, but it is widely believed that the numbers planted so far are much less than the numbers that would be needed to fully address the problem (e.g. Bartle et al. 1996; Anonymous 1997).
Technical soundness can also be greatly affected by the quality of implementation by farmers. This is most likely to be true for complex farming systems, for which the risk of poor implementation is higher. If implementation is poor, it not only means that current results from the system are poor, but it also creates the risk that farmers will wrongly draw negative conclusions about the system in general, leading to disadoption. A further possible negative spin off is non-adoption by other farmers who are standing back and watching for successful results. We know that a large proportion of farmers do wait to observe whether innovative farmers successfully apply new practices before attempting to test the practices themselves (Abadi Ghadim et al. 1996).
Finally, the farmer’s perception of technical soundness is also affected by the observability of results from trials of the system, as discussed in the previous section. For technologies addressing processes of slow degradation, it may be a very long time indeed before a farmer’s uncertainty about the soundness of the technology is sufficiently reduced to prompt widespread adoption.
Making the system profitable
The earlier quotes from Lindner (1987), Cary and Wilkinson (1997), and Sinden and King (1990) emphasise the importance of ensuring that the new system is profitable. In this context, "profitable" means that the new farming system is economically superior to the current farming system. It is not sufficient for it to generate benefits in excess of input costs; it must also cover opportunity costs - the profits from alternative methods of resource use which must be foregone in order to use the resources in the new way.
The discussion thus far has focussed on perceptions, but the only way to create enduring perceptions of profitability is for the system to be profitable in fact. With large amounts of energy and resources devoted to persuasion, it may be possible to temporarily create an overly-optimistic perception of a system, but once farmers have personal experience with the system, they will certainly put more weight on this than on any amount of persuasion or exhortation. Thus, successful trials or successful adoption are necessary for favourable perceptions in the medium to long term.
One potential threat to the actual profitability of a new, complex system is that there are likely to be substantial costs in establishing and maintaining the new system. This is particularly true of systems involving trees. Even if labour and finance availability are not absolutely constrained, their high requirements are costs which must be at least offset by the benefits.
There may be additional negative impacts of the new technology, such as,
These problems, and any others, are not necessarily fatal, but they must be set against the expected long- and short-term benefits of the new system to reach a realistic assessment of its value.
Determining whether the system is profitable
We have discussed the farmers’ perceptions of whether a system is profitable, and some factors relating to whether the system is actually profitable. A third, related point is the capacity of scientists or extension agents to determine whether a system is profitable in order for them to be able to tell whether they should promote it or seek to modify it further. For a complex farming system, this is a much more difficult task than often recognised. To illustrate, Pannell (1995) presents a list of 30 factors that influence the profitability of legume-based farming systems, grouped into short-term profit factors, dynamic factors, sustainability factors, risk factors, and whole-farm factors. It should be clear from this that simple economic assessments of complex farming systems are likely to be of little value, or even of negative value if they seriously mislead (as is not unlikely).
Heterogeneity of farm situations
It should not be thought that there is a single farming system that would apply across all farming regions, or even on all farms within a region. The reality is that optimal farm management practices depend on a wide range of factors which can vary markedly from farm to farm, paddock to paddock and farmer to farmer. Thus farmers’ responses to a new innovation will vary, not just because the farmers have different attitudes and beliefs but also because their farms vary so much in factors such as total area, soil types, soil fertility, machinery availability, financial resources, climate, weeds present and labour. Thus the aim of Landcare can only be to influence farming practices in the aggregate, recognising that the biophysical and human responses will vary markedly between farms.
The timing of benefits and costs
Sustainable farming systems are often characterised by high up-front costs, and benefits that occur some time in the future. If farmers have to borrow money to pay the up-front costs, it is obvious that any direct comparison of the up-front costs with the eventual benefits will not be valid without allowing for the cost of interest. Even if a farmer has savings available to be invested in the system, this implies that interest that could be earned on the savings will be sacrificed. Apart from possible differences in the relevant interest rates, there is no conceptual difference between having to pay interest and having to give up earning of interest. Both would have the same impact on the decision of whether to invest in the new farming system. This is a simple version of the rationale which economists use for discounting future benefits in order to make them comparable to current costs.
Social or institutional issues
There are many examples of social or institutional issues which influence adoption decisions (Rogers, 1995). Examples include the following:
Why is Adoption of Sustainable Practices Slow or Low?
Through the foregoing discussion, I have identified a range of factors that tend to increase the steepness of the adoption hill. In this section, I highlight factors which are particularly likely to inhibit uptake of practices for conservation of land quality.
Lack of profitable options
The more profitable an innovation is, the more likely it is to be adopted. Conversely, those innovations for which adoption is slow or low are more likely to be of low or negative profitability. Almost by definition, the innovations whose non-adoption is a source of frustration to Landcare facilitators are those that are least likely to be adopted and those for which extension is least likely to make a difference. To some extent this explains the observation that Landcare technologies are often un-profitable - the profitable ones are already widely adopted and so of little concern to the Landcare program. However there are land degradation problems for which the only available technically feasible options are unprofitable even in the long run (e.g. dryland salinity in many parts of Western Australia). One response to this reality is to argue that in these cases attempts to promote adoption should focus on benefits other than long-term profit. While this may be effective with some farmers, I believe that it will have very limited success in most cases. A second, more realistic response is to recognise that the tools of extension will probably not be effective in these cases, and to seek other approaches such as R&D to create improved options, or new policies (e.g. subsidies or penalties) which increase the incentives or decrease the disincentives for adoption.
Externalities
A negative externality is an adverse impact caused by one farmer on another, such as an increase in dryland salinity on one farm due to clearing on another. In some circles, the importance of externalities as a cause of market failure has been greatly over-stated (e.g. Hayes, 1997), but it is nevertheless true that it can be an important problem affecting adoption. One reason is that the farmer who is the source of the externality normally fails to take its impacts into account when making their management decisions, so the benefits of adoption as perceived by the farmer are less than the total benefits. A second reason that is under-recognised is that if a farmer perceives that his or her salinity problem arises on another farm, the incentives for adoption are much reduced. For example, a farmer may believe that trees would be worth planting, except for the risk that they will be killed by a rising saline water table caused by other farmers. The emphasis on whole-catchment management in recent years has tended to create the impression in farmers’ minds that this risk is high, even though in many cases it is not.
High transaction costs
In some cases, externality problems could be solved by direct negotiation between farmers. However there are costs of various types in any negotiation for which the stakes are high:
Collectively these are transaction costs, where the transaction in this case is an agreement.
In other cases, the process of negotiation is even more difficult because there is a multitude of sources of the problem, or there is uncertainty about who is the source. In such a case, the transaction costs outlined above are likely to be substantially greater.
High transaction costs mean that any externality problem is unlikely to be solved without outside government intervention, so the disincentives to adoption outlined above in the "externalities" section will persist.
Long time scales
The issues of concern to Landcare are all long term. The degradation processes of concern occur over decades, and the practices designed to ameliorate the degradation are often slow to take effect. For this reason, Landcare problems are often particularly susceptible to the problems of up-front costs incurring interest before benefits are realised, as outlined earlier. In addition, long time scales make it much more difficult to overcome problems of uncertainty, as outlined below. Finally it means that farmers who are forced by circumstances to give priority to short-term profits are unable to adopt even if the innovations would eventually be profitable enough to offset the up-front costs and interest.
Uncertainty
The issue of uncertainty is particularly important. For many land degradation problems, the proposed treatments are subject to high levels of uncertainty from various sources, including:
- uncertainty about the innovation’s long term profitability,
- uncertainty about the innovation’s impact on ecological/environmental values,
- uncertainty about whether investment in the innovation will be wiped out by externalities (e.g. movement of salt and water from another property).
Not only are farmers highly uncertain about these issues, but the potential for this uncertainty to be reduced by trialing is often very limited.
High cost/low information value of trials
As noted earlier, for some innovations, large scale trials are needed. Farmers are reluctant to invest in these, for very sound reasons. Even where trials are undertaken, the results can be very much more difficult to observe than traditional farming practices. For example, if a new fertilizer is trialed on a wheat crop, reasonably accurate information about its performance is available within a year, at least for one set of climatic conditions. If an area of trees is planted, its growth each year can only be estimated until the year of harvest, and additional impacts, such as lowering of the water table, are much more difficult and unreliable to measure than things such as wheat yield.
How Can Landcare Extension Contribute?
Let us start by considering what Landcare extension cannot do. Currently, Landcare extension is conducted right across the spectrum of farming systems and land degradation problems. However it should be clear from the earlier discussion that there are limits to the circumstances where extension can be effective. I believe that the efficiency of Landcare could be improved substantially if efforts were made to identify these limits and operate within them. Outside these limits, other approaches such as R&D or regulation may be used alone, or they may help to change the nature of the adoption problem such that extension can become effective.
Of the factors in the last section, extension appears to have a very limited potential to reduce the problems of lack of profitable options (e.g. Barr and Cary, 1992), externalities and long time scales. This is not a criticism of Landcare, just a recognition that different tools have different uses.
If this is accepted, then the Landcare facilitator’s role is best conceived as helping the farmers make better decisions for their own benefit and this requires respect for the farmer’s own judgement about what is in their own best interest. In other words, take the notions of "empowerment" and "bottom up decision making" seriously. If this approach is implemented well but still fails to result in adoption of practices that the community wants, it simply means that extension is not the right tool to achieve this.
Identify winners (from the farmer’s perspective)
Landcare coordinators are in an ideal situation to help other players (farmers, scientists, policy makers) identify which of the available management practices are likely to be sufficiently attractive to farmers in the long run. Landcare should avoid assuming that the available management options are in farmers’ interests, or concluding that they are beneficial based on a narrow set of considerations. This recommendation implies a significant change in approach for the Landcare movement.
Assessment of management options which are candidates for Landcare extension needs to be broad and conducted from the farmer’s perspective. In most cases, it should not just depend on short term financial gain but must consider the full range of factors impinging on the innovations attractiveness. For example, a comprehensive assessment may include the following factors (adapted from Vanclay 1997):
It may be helpful to involve economists or consultants in the assessment, but the issues are not merely financial. The assessment should also recognise the diversity of farmers and farm situations, searching for niches for the available practices, rather than seeking blanket applicability.
When this process identifies practices which are not likely to be attractive to individual farmers, but which nevertheless are perceived to have broader social or environmental benefits, Landcare may play a valuable role by encouraging or facilitating other means to promote the practice. For example, it would be very valuable for Landcare facilitators to provide feedback to scientists about unmet needs or problems with existing options, or advise policy makers about the magnitude or type of government assistance that would be needed to make farmers willing to ascend the hill.
Once adoptable practices have been identified, the following areas become relevant.
Raise awareness/promote stewardship
This traditional role for Landcare was not sufficient, but it is still a very important contribution, especially given the slow rate at which awareness occurs in many cases.
Reduce uncertainty
A major and important challenge for Landcare is to develop methods to help to more rapidly reduce farmers’ uncertainty about land conservation practices. A starting point for this would be to recognise factors that tend to reduce uncertainty, such as:
Landcare may also be able to foster a culture of innovation, experimentation, and learning among farmers. This will help farmers more rapidly form accurate judgements about innovations.
Increase farmers’ skills
An important role for agricultural extension in general is the dissemination of information about the detailed agronomic and mechanical techniques which enhance the performance of a general practice. This helps to ensure that the potentially beneficial practices are actually beneficial for the farmers.
Increase social capital and social infrastructure
This is another traditional emphasis of Landcare which is likely to be a worthwhile contribution, although again not usually sufficient in itself. The social capital engendered in Landcare groups helps to promote transfer of farmer skills and knowledge. It also may help to reduce transaction costs involved in negotiations and so reduce the negative consequences of externalities.
It appears to me that several of these issues would be helped by a process of participatory research. In particular, indentifying winners, reducing uncertainty, increasing skills, and increasing social capital may all be helped by a participatory approach.
Overall, however, there is no simple method by which Landcare practices can be promoted. But it is clear that a good understanding of the adoption process helps to identify avenues for Landcare extension that are most likely to be beneficial, as well as encouraging a clearer recognition of circumstances in which it will be ineffective or premature.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Don McFarlane, Dan Carter, Steven Schilizzi, Nicole Glenn, Sally Marsh and Simone Blennerhassett for helpful comments, to Bob Lindner for help and inspiration and to the Grains Research and Development Corporation and the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation for funding of related research projects. Parts of this paper are based on Pannell (1998), written at the request of Ted Lefroy for a Workshop on Agriculture as a Mimic of Natural Ecosystems, Perth, Western Australia, September 2-6 1997.
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Citation: Pannell, D.J. (1998). Landcare and the adoption of sustainable farming systems, Proceedings, Profitable and Sustainable Farming Systems - Where are the $?, Marcus Oldham College, Geelong, Victoria, 2-3 July 1998.
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Adoption, diffusion and extension papers, UWA