The agricultural sector plays a key role in ensuring sustainable and resource-efficient food production, supporting rural community resilience and economic development, addressing the biodiversity and nature crises, facilitating green recovery and tackling the global climate emergency. Following UK departure from the EU, and therefore Common Agricultural Policy, the Scottish Government recognises the importance of developing a resilient and productive agricultural sector, which will require major changes to farmer behaviour.
COMBINE (“Co-designing and implementing best-fit farming practices”) is a research project at The James Hutton Institute which aims to identify and develop approaches that can positively influence farmer behaviour.
The project is grounded in empirical evidence that farmers often learn best from other farmers, and that minor changes to farming practices occur on a continuous basis. In contrast, major transformational changes tend to be rarer, usually in response to ‘trigger’ events (e.g. EU exit, the new National Development Plan for Crofting, disease outbreaks and major weather events). Following these types of triggers, farmers have been shown to actively seek and implement innovative solutions.
The project will assess how these ‘trigger events’ affect changes in basic and best-fit practices. Basic practices are the minimum standards which farmers are expected to achieve, typically defined by regulation and linked to eligibility for support payments (e.g. maintaining agricultural land in good agricultural and environmental condition). We refer to ‘best fit practices’ asthe optimal practices for a given farm within its socio-ecological context. These differ between farms depending on land capability, farm size, commodities produced etc.
New approaches will be co-designed with farmers and industry stakeholders, empirically tested through applied agroecology, parasitology and experimental economics and vetted with policy officers. These new approaches will be promoted through on-farm demonstrations, workshops, training events and multimedia campaigns.
Research will be achieved through a combination of:
- longitudinal research with a representative sample of Scottish farmers which identifies key trigger points and incremental shifts in farming practice – the ‘Farmer Intentions Survey’;
- three sets of ‘living labs’ and empirical case studies which work directly with farmers and industry stakeholders to co-create, implement and evaluate approaches to influencing farmer behaviour ‘on the ground’ in three key areas:
- Livestock biosecurity measures
- Arable and horticulture
- Diversification
- economic experiments to test the utility of new measures and interventions and how these can be broadly implemented.
The project is complementary to parallel projects in SRUC-B3-01, continuing a long-term partnership. The overall Hutton approach is transdisciplinary, transecting social and natural scientific boundaries, emphasising the mechanisms through which meaningful change can be achieved. The structure of the project as well as its interactions within B3 and across the RESAS programme are illustrated in the diagram below:
