Helping Farmers Make Complex Choices: A Sustainable Decision Tool for Farmers By Susan B. Kask, Ph.D. Business and Economics Warren Wilson College Asheville, NC [email protected] and Laura Lengnick, Ph.D Sustainable Agriculture Warren Wilson College Asheville, NC [email protected] Final Report of the Farm Prosperity Project Modeling Team on research supported by the Improved Farm Profit with Farmland Protection and High Value Crops Program, NRI Grant # 2005-35618-15645. Submitted to the National Research Initiative of the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, USDA. March 24, 2009 Acknowledgements We wish to express our appreciation to Marta Eckert-Mills and Sophia Levin-Hatz for their exceptional work assisting the Modelling Team in this research. 2 Executive Summary The Farm Prosperity Project was a collaborative research and education project involving a multidisciplinary team of cooperators from North Carolina State University, Land of Sky Regional Council, Warren Wilson College, the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, and three land preservation non-profits active in the project region: Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy, American Farmland Trust, Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. The project aimed to offer technical support to farmers facing complex decisions in a region distinguished by changing markets and intense land development pressure. Leadership on the project was divided into three teams with responsibility for project work on one of three focus areas: High Value Crops, Farmland Protection or Decision Modeling. These teams were assisted in their work by a group of 32 farm families who agreed to participate in the project in focus groups, on-farm interviews and educational workshops. The Modeling Team’s main role in the Farm Prosperity Project was to conduct research to understand the nature of farmer decision-making, to determine the suitability of a standard set of sustainability indicators for use by farmers in the study region and to develop a decision aid for farm managers that would foster sustainability. The participatory nature of this research informed the development of a do-it-yourself, values-based decision tool for use by farmers rather than a quantitative, data based expert decision model. The decision framework developed by the Modeling Team integrates the use of sustainability indicators in the practice of Whole Farm Management with a sustainable choice model. Drawing on the utility of the Multi-Criteria Evaluation approach to complex decision-making, this sustainable choice model integrates research-based knowledge of sustainable agriculture and rural community development, consumer theory, and decision theory. The Modeling Team created a draft of the decision tool guide as a booklet. The booklet guides the farmer through five steps to create a farm sustainability profile useful to farm management decisions and provides directions for the use of two different choice models to support the selection of “best fit” enterprise and farmland protection options for the farm. The booklet includes worksheets and directions to select and prioritize a set of indicators for the farm, personalize performance charts for each indicator selected, plot the farm sustainability profile, and use the farm sustainability profile as a management tool to monitor farm performance and evaluate the impact of different management options on farm sustainability. The guide includes the best available technical information on the farm performance of 32 sustainability indicators and includes an example of a Western North Carolina farm family using the tool to make decisions about how farmland protection and new enterprises might influence farm profitability and total family income. The Decision Tool developed in this project has several strengths and weaknesses: 3 Decision Tool Strengths • Uses standard sustainability indicators and choice models with strong research base • Provide farmers a tool that appears to improve clarity in goal setting, ability to monitor farm performance, and clarity and confidence in their management choices • Compatible with Whole Farm Management and directly supports goal setting, resource assessment and monitoring activities • Can be used with existing stand alone Resource Assessment and Enterprise Analysis tools • Easy to use, iterative process with “DIY” simplicity • Focus is on supporting farmer choices for their farm with consideration of the many dimensions of their farm and community. Decision Tool Weaknesses • Requires awareness of goals • Requires the use of Whole Farm Planning practices • Many sustainability indicators are poorly supported with existing technical literature • Little or no information about benchmarks for sustainable performance of most indicators • No research base to support use of user-defined indicators • Choice processes have not been tested for farmer usability and robustness The Modeling Team recommends that additional participatory research be conducted before the Decision Tool is released for use by farmers and technical advisors. More research is needed to test the utility of the Decision Tool Guide in farm decision-making, to better develop the technical information on sustainable farm performance presented in the guide, and to improve overall design and layout. In addition, research to test the impact of tool use on farm sustainability and farmer decision-making is also necessary before release of the tool for use by farmers. This research has also highlighted the astounding lack of useful technical guidance for farmers wishing to use sustainability indicators in Whole Farm Management. In particular, there is almost no research-based information on benchmarks and performance values for standard farm-based sustainability indicators. This information is critical to the use of sustainability assessment and monitoring of farm family and rural community well-being. The research-based development of farm performance benchmarks and simple methods of monitoring sustainability indicators is essential if society wishes to reap the multiple benefits of a sustainable agriculture. 4 Introduction Sustainability and Choice … sustainable development, which implies meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, should become a central guiding principle of the United Nations, governments and private institutions, organizations and enterprise (UN World Commission, 1987). Sustain, v. …..3. To keep (a person or community, the mind, spirit, etc.) from failing or giving way ME. 4. To keep in being; to cause to continue in a certain state; to keep or maintain at the proper level or standard; to preserve the status of….(OED, 1980). The reference to ‘sustainability’ relating environmental issues to poverty and economic growth was introduced to the United Nations and to the world as a guiding principle by the Brundtland report of 1987. The shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 1980 gave 12 listings defining the verb to sustain . In essence it was defined as ‘to prevent failure of person or community,’ or to cause continuation in a ‘proper level or standard’. The Brundtland report’s ‘definition’ of sustainability, that has become commonly accepted worldwide, emphasizes the ability of future generations to achieve their needs (often defined as a desired level or standard of living). Thus the key to understanding sustainability is to define the qualities of life that we wish to sustain and to understand the resources and processes that provide future generations the ability to meet these levels. With an understanding of the wants and needs of a community that wishes to sustain itself and the knowledge of the resources needed to achieve sustainability, the community can make decisions and design policies that bring together the dimensions of sustainability they have defined for their community. Unfortunately sustainable choices are not so easy when there are multiple goals, many stakeholders, lots of uncertainty and more to consider. Successful management of this complexity is the process of sustainability, the how part of solving the problems identified in the Brundtland report and the how part of achieving the goals set out by communities and enterprise. Thus when understanding sustainability we can identify two elements – the content and the process – of sustainability. The content of sustainability includes the identification, understanding, and benchmarking of the ‘proper standards and levels’ for each sphere (environmental, social, and economic). The process of sustainability involves how the above information is identified and collected and also how it is used in order to make decisions and design policy. The complexity of the sustainable choice often decreases the desire to pursue such actions thus leading to people to say they want to make sustainable choices, or environmental choices, but they can’t afford it, don’t think their decisions really matter, or just can’t think about it because it is too hard! 5 In order to bring sustainability onto the radar screen for farmers and rural communities, two conditions are required: • They need to be motivated to do things differently. This can occur either internally though shifting value systems or leadership in a firm, or externally from society, consumers, other external stakeholders (e.g. stock holders). • They need to know that there are other options and how too choose between these other options. In other words,