The Mediterranean region is facing major challenges for soil conservation and sustainable agriculture. Conservation agriculture (CA), including reduced soil disturbance, can help conserve soils and improve soil fertility, but its adoption in the Mediterranean region is limited. Examining farmers’ perceptions of soil and underlying sociocultural factors can help shed light on adoption of soil management practices. In this paper, we conducted a survey with 590 farmers across Morocco, Spain and Tunisia to explore concepts that are cognitively associated with soil and (...) perceptions of tillage. We also evaluated differences in perceptions of innovation, community, adaptive capacity, and responsibility for soil. We found that farmers’ cognitive associations with soil show awareness of soil as a living resource, go beyond agriculture and livelihoods to reveal cultural ties, and link to multiple levels of human needs. Beliefs about the benefits of tillage for water availability and yield persist among the surveyed farmers. We found that openness towards innovation, perceived adaptive capacity and responsibility for soil were associated with minimum tillage, whereas community integration was not. Education, age and farm lifestyle were also associated with differences in these perceptions. CA promotion in the Mediterranean should emphasize the multiple values of soil, should demonstrate how sufficient yields may be achieved alongside resilience to drought, and be tailored to differing levels of environmental awareness and economic needs across north and south. (shrink)

Increasing farmers’ acceptance and adoption of environmentally beneficial farming practices is essential for mitigating negative impacts of agriculture. To support adoption through policy, it is necessary to understand which types of farms or farmers do or do not apply such practices. However, farmers are not a homogeneous group and their behavior is subject to a complex array of structural, socioeconomic, and socio-psychological influences. Reducing this complexity, farmer typologies or archetypes are useful tools for understanding differing motivations for the uptake of (...) sustainable farming practices. Previous investigations of the role of farmer archetypes in the adoption of such practices rely on either purely qualitative or purely quantitative methods in data collection, typology creation, and hypothesis testing. Our study combines both approaches by classifying survey respondents into farmer types based on a previous Q methodological study. We then use these types in a two-part regression model that aims to explain participation in agri-environmental schemes and the level of scheme participation. To control for farm structural factors, we additionally link our questionnaire data to secondary data from the farm accountancy data network. Results indicate that in Austria, AES are attractive to all types of farmers, but the level of participation in these schemes differs between archetypes: Profitability-oriented farmers participate less, and nature-oriented farmers participate more than other types. This suggests that monetary compensations for sustainable farming practices are not perceived as sufficient by certain groups of farmers, and policy makers need to consider additional kinds of incentives. (shrink)