Preliminary Report: Communicating Agricultural Research by Speaking to Farmer Values

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Preliminary Report: Communicating Agricultural Research by Speaking to Farmer Values Developed as part of the NSF-supported LTER project, “Recognizing Value Pluralism among Ecosystem Services Experts and Public Stakeholders,” Zach Piso, Christina Leshko, Samantha Noll, & Ian Werkheiser

public. We have systematized the answers to this question to show certain themes that emerged over the four discussion groups. Further, we have constructed heuristics that researchers could consider when thinking about communicating their science. The first set of heuristics regards strategies for communicating existing research. The second set of heuristics regards the development of research questions that, when scientifically investigated, would yield results that our researched community would find valuable.

This report shares our process and findings for “Recognizing Value Pluralism among Ecosystem Services Experts and Public Stakeholders.” The research project was conducted under the 2013 Summer Research Fellowship for the Kellogg Biological Station's National Science Foundation-Supported Long-Term Ecological Research. This project explored different ways of valuing the environment between (1) academic experts studying ecosystem services and (2) farmers engaged in direct marketing. The project considered how these values motivated or might motivate environmental management decisions.

This paper is divided into four sections. In section one, we discuss the background that motivated this research project and a bit about ourselves and what our own backgrounds bring to the project. In section two, we lay out the methodology of our research and briefly address why we chose the methodological frameworks and populations we did. In section three, we discuss some of the rough, initial findings of the research, and what they might mean. In section four, we offer recommendations based on these initial findings for how this research might be used. We hope that this initial report will be a useful document to provoke discussion about sustainability research, ecosystem services, and environmental values.

This white paper will share our methods for fostering dialogue with local farmers and some of the initial findings from that dialogue. These methods involved constructing discussion questions that would encourage these farmers to share their agricultural practices, explain why they adopted those practices and not others, and articulate the values that gave purpose to their explanations. We focus here on the results of the culminating discussion question: “What sorts of agricultural research would help you realize your goals for sustainable agriculture?” Recognizing the diversity of farmers’ answer to this question can support stronger communication between scientific experts and the 1

Background:

both farming inexpensively and protecting the surrounding watershed, and we learn about a new practice that would help us realize one of these goals but detract from the other, then it definitely matters which of these goals is more important to us. The alternative perspective would be value monism, which treats all values as expressions of the more general category of value. On this view, we should choose practices that maximize the total value possible, without getting wrapped up in which of our goals we hold dearest. While our research team endorses value pluralism, it is important to note that value monism might be necessary for developing policies that govern a public comprised of diverse individuals with diverse goals. Accounts of ecosystem services, as developed and refined by economists, have found traction among policymakers and is characteristically value monist.

This project was guided by the

seemingly straightforward research question—“How can we encourage the public to act more sustainably?” This is a question that is at the core of communicating our scientific research. If the public adopted the practices recommended by our best scientific research, we might mitigate the worst of the environmental damages that human activities cause. Presumably, living in a healthy environment is something that we all value, and hence we would expect that the public would adopt practices that would contribute to a healthier environment. This line of thinking is more or less correct, even if it oversimplifies the situation. In order to deepen our understanding, it helps to reflect momentarily on the relationship between our scientific researchers and the broader public. Of course, both scientists and the broader public are members of a shared community, and that community has to negotiate the goals for collective action, and decide on the best means for realizing those goals. These are two separate questions, and in order to address the second of these questions—how to realize our goals—scientists must in part leave the community, dedicate their lives to specializing in particular methodologies, and employ these rigorous methods in their investigations. These investigations suggest more effective means of realizing the goals that were negotiated by the shared community. For example, a study demonstrating that significantly reduced fertilization can still produce the same yields is an enormously important finding when you are trying to farm without unnecessary expenses, or trying to farm with as little impact on the surrounding watershed as possible.1 One necessary condition for successful communication, then, is that the scientist must return to the community with a new practice for realizing the goals of the broader public. Also necessary is that this tool doesn’t have additional consequences that might inhibit the realization of other goals of higher priority, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

These philosophical asides might reveal that the research team is, for the most part, not scientists; Christina Leshko is a sociologist who works on community values, while the Samantha Noll, Zach Piso, and Ian Werkheiser are environmental philosophers. What would we have to say, then, about agricultural research? First, it is important to keep in mind that scientific investigation is one phase of the broader deliberative project of identifying and realizing community goals. We are decidedly not helpful when it comes to realizing these goals; for that you almost certainly need scientific expertise. We hope however that this project might shed some clarity on the other side of this deliberative project, the task of identifying the values and goals of public stakeholders. While surveys and other social science methods can be exceedingly useful for identifying goals, we suspect that (if the public is anything like us, or anyone we know) the community is not especially adept at articulating their values. In part because publics do not regularly engage in deliberative decision-making, public stakeholders spend very little time reflecting on what they value and crafting succinct ways of articulating these values during ten-minute surveys. For anyone who has read Socrates, the long and rich history of philosophical interrogation is well known. Socrates described his role as that of a gadfly, pestering the citizens of Athens to clarify their positions and negotiate competing values. We are, at our best, those gadflies.

There are a few remarks that must be made at this point. This view implies what we have referred to as “value pluralism,” which stands in contrast to value monism. According to value pluralism, there are important differences between the things that we value. If we value

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network contacts (MSU Ag Extension and MSU agricultural conferences). Farmers interested in participating in the project were encouraged to recommend other farmers and networks that they believed should be included, and so a snowball sampling technique was used as we attempted to follow up on all recommendations. In total, over 100 individual farms were contacted, with 25 individuals representing 16 farms choosing to participate in dinner discussions. Eight individuals were interested, but unable to participate due to date/time conflicts; six farms reported that they were no longer in operation, and six individuals responded that they were not interested or too busy.

Methods:

The research team conducted focus groups to encourage direct marketers to discuss their environmental management practices in an open conversation that is designed to elicit community values through emergent discourse. Careful attention to discourse considers the “dialogical” and “dialectical” dimensions to discussion. Discourse is dialogical because speakers assume their audience is familiar with a certain worldview. Attention to these assumptions can reveal what the community generally accepts. Only argumentative discourse is dialectical, since discourse is dialectical when speakers disagree about an issue and exchange reasons for their positions. Attention to these reasons can reveal what the community is still negotiating.

Farmers reported that attending discussions over the summer is especially difficult given the constant cycles of planting and harvesting. We worked with participants to identify dates, times, and locations that were nearby and fit within the harvesting-marketing schedule. This resulted in two dinner discussions held in East Lansing, MI at the East Lansing Food Cooperative (Thursday, June 6 & 13, 6pm-9pm) and two dinner discussions held in Grand Rapids at the MSU Ag Extension office (Monday, June 17 & Wednesday, June 26, 6pm-9pm). While participants were also recruited from the

Of course, focus groups are not possible without community members volunteering to participate. Recruitment took place over a six-week period (MayJune 2013) through e-mailing direct marketing listservs, and both calling and e-mailing farmers active in several direct marketing networks. Contact information for direct market farmers was attained through both public online resources (localharvest.org, foodshed.net, realtimefarms.com, and localdifference.org) and private

Table 1: Demographics of Sample (16 farms, 25 participants) Farm Characteristics (out of 16 farms)

Less than 5 acres (6) 5-9 acres (2) 10-19 acres (1) 20-29 acres (1) 30-49 acres (1) 50-75 acres (2) More than 75 acres (3)

Farm Products (out of 16 farms)

Direct Marketing Practices (out of 15 farms)

Vegetables (16) Fruits (7) Flowers (5) Herbs (4) Eggs (3) Honey (3) Pork (2) Transplants (1) Poultry (1) Beef (1) Hay (1)

CSA (9) Farmer’s Market (7) Farm Stand (7) Restaurants (3) Food Coop. (2)

Participant Characteristics (out of 25 participants) 20-29 (2) 30-39 (9) 40-49 (1) 50-59 (6) 60-69 (5) High school (3) Some college (4) Bachelors degree (9) Advanced degree (7) White (25) Male (13) Female (10)

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Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor areas, there was insufficient interest to schedule a focus group.

season, and (2) directly market their produce. The first of these criteria ensures that participating farmers would benefit from the agricultural research conducted at the KBS LTER, which principally focuses on crop production. The second criterion relates to our emphasis on the social dimensions of agriculture as a socialecological system. We believe that farmers who directly market their produce are crucially positioned to influence the social-ecological system.

Dinner, drinks, and dessert were prepared by the research team and provided to participants to express gratitude for their time commitment to this project. Participants qualified for mileage compensation at the MSU rate of $0.56/mile for roundtrip travel up to 50 miles. Several farmers reported that they agreed to participate in large part because of the opportunity to meet and discuss these issues with fellow farmers.

Agricultural research and services tend to privilege large farms in part because smaller farms are not mobilized to secure these benefits.

Why Direct Marketers? We defined our populations as all farmers who (1) have grown produce for at least one 2 This focus on large farms makes a great deal of sense for sustainability research because these producers manage the most farmland and have the largest direct environmental impact. Why, then, our focus on farms that employ direct marketing? The first consideration to note is that, since most of the studies have focused on farmers that manage the most land, fewer studies have investigated the values and motivations of smaller farmers. The studies of the larger farms indicate that larger farms are principally concerned with issues having to do with profits and yields.3,4 Profits are heavily influenced by broader market forces that set prices for goods, and these market forces are shaped by policies and standards imposed by governments. This is of course an oversimplification of the social aspects of the socialecological system, and it suggests that the most effective measure to increase sustainability is to pass new regulations that change the economic landscape. Since few agricultural researchers are in a position to influence these policy decisions directly, the challenge is to find pathways to intervene in the system that will indirectly shape the economic landscape that is so crucial to large farm adoption practices.

movements.56 For the purposes of this study, direct marketing is defined as farm-to-consumer sales, such as through farmer’s markets, community-supported agriculture (CSA), roadside stands, and “out the backdoor” orders. Direct market farms may have participated in one or more of these farm-to-consumer sale methods. Recruitment focused on crop producing farms, but several farms also produced finished products such as honey, and animal products such as eggs and meat. Through direct marketing, farmers convey the benefits of their produce and the farming practices that sustain their farms.

Broader Trends in Michigan Agriculture Agriculture is Michigan's second largest industry. While field crops make up a significant portion of production, the numbers of farms in Michigan increased from 53,315 to 56,014 between 2002 and 2007.7 During the same period, the average size of farms shrank, leaving officials to attribute the growth to an increase in small farms. USDA census data also supports this conclusion, as it shows a slight decrease in large holder farmers but significant growth of farms between 1-49 acres between 2002-2007. A similar trend can be seen in many other states. In addition, numbers of MI farmers markets have grown from 90 in 2001 to more than 300 in 2012.8 Growth in both small farms and in numbers of farmers markets have been steadily rising on the national level, as well, thus making Michigan an excellent test site with broader implications.

A more synoptic view of the social-ecological system suggests that policies and standards are responsive to politically mobilized stakeholders. Hence one pathway to indirectly shape policies and standards is by motivating sustainable agriculture among farmers who participate in this political mobilization, for example the local foods social movement or the organic foods social movement. We used the "direct marketing" criterion as an indicator of farms that were positioned to potentially participate in the sharing of sustainable values and supporting such 4

them. The first stage is fostering communication between the farming community and the scientific community, and, as the introduction explained, this communication depends on scientists understanding the goals of these public stakeholders.

Farmer Perspectives on Communities and Certifications Our discussions with farmers lent support to this depiction of the social-ecological system. Farmers expressed that an important element of sustainability is the relationship with the general public as their customers. This is a back-and-forth relationship; farmers are constantly educating the public about their sustainable practices, and the expectations of the public influence the practices that are worth pursuing and promoting for the farmers. Farmers believe that the public say they want things like “organic” or “natural” produce, but do not (yet) know how that ought to be translated in practice, and have largely negative definitions (no pesticides, for example) rather than positive ones. So farmers use certifications like USDA Organic, MAEAP, and GAP to communicate their farms’ identities quickly to customers in ways the customers understand and value. At the same time, the farmers try to engage with the public in a conversation about how these rigid certifications don’t recognize the diversity of farms. Often farmers stress that their practices, though unrecognized by existing certifications, are more sustainable and environmentally friendly. The desired end result is either a move away from the certifications themselves (to "better than organic," for example) or a reform of the certifications and the institutions that grant them. All this is at least preliminary evidence that looking at farmers engaged in direct marketing is a useful window into the growing and changing social movement around food and agriculture.

Discussion Protocol: Although the focus groups were scheduled for three hour blocks, the first half hour was dedicated to unrecorded introductions and allowing time for participants to arrive. During introductions, the research team shared their interest in the project, their relation to the KBS LTER, and the project’s goal of representing the values of local direct marketers in agricultural research. We also explained the discussion format. Individuals were given two minutes to sketch out their own answers before group discussion started, and individuals chose whether to volunteer what they had written (all were encouraged to share). One team member would track key discussion points on a large public notepad to encourage the group to refer to previous ideas. When discussion reached a natural stopping point or exceeded the allotted time by more than ten minutes, participants were asked to take a moment to reflect on this public notepad and comment on its accuracy and comprehensiveness. Two one-hour blocks of discussion were divided by a half-hour break for the dinner. Over the two hours of discussion, the team posed the following five questions: What does sustainable agriculture mean to you? What practices do you use on your farm to achieve sustainability? How do you market your produce as sustainable?

If our suspicions are correct and direct marketers are crucially positioned to inform the sorts of social movements that inspire new policies, then agricultural researchers will want to understand the plural environmental values that lead direct marketers to adopt new practices. As agricultural researchers, we want to ensure that this community is informed by the most rigorous understanding of the environmental issues that the community finds salient. We would hope that direct marketers encourage other farmers to adopt scientifically informed practices, that they inspire customers to purchase produce grown via these practices, and that they campaign for standards that recognize these practices and, when necessary, policies that mandate

What practices would a good environmental certification program promote? What agricultural research would help you achieve your sustainability goals? As the Background section indicates, we do not believe that community members are ordinarily prepared to discuss values. These questions were carefully designed to encourage participants to discuss “boundary objects.” Boundary objects are familiar topics on which members of the community probably have different opinions given their different experiences and values. The first question, 5

“What does sustainable agriculture mean to you?” set a stage for subsequent dialogue by demonstrating the diversity of definitions for sustainability. By recording these definitions on the public notepad, team members and participants were able to reference the diversity of values subsumed under sustainable agriculture. For example, if the group persistently discussed the importance of local agriculture without detailing their reasons, a team member could ask whether local agriculture was important because (gesturing to the notepad) local agriculture decreased fossil fuel consumption or local agriculture increased connections in the community. This helped prevent the team from introducing values that were not authentically introduced by the group.

agricultural research, the group had cultivated a rich vernacular that supported a fluent discussion of environmental values. Table 2 provides a list of many of the specific research questions that came out of the focus groups. We have divided these specific research questions into different themes, themes which we believe will be the most useful for researchers to think about how their own research interests might align with farmers’ needs. It should be pointed out that other divisions are possible; for example there are several research questions in each category that might fit under the heading of Integrated Pest Management. We preferred a scheme that made most obvious the values that were motivating the question.

The remaining four questions all centered on boundary objects that were part of the everyday lives of the participants: farming practices, marketing practices, food standards and certifications, and agricultural research. Usually, group discussion proceeded dialectically, with participants (1) sharing their practices or opinions and (2) explaining their reasons for employing that practice or holding that opinion. Most commonly, other participants would endorse the reasoning or offer additional reasons for employing the practice; rarely would participants openly disagree with one another. The team would interject if the team was unclear about the values that the participant was evoking, such as in the example on local foods, or if the conversation seemed mired in descriptions of existing standards/certifications without indicating whether the specific criteria were valuable.

The information coming out of the focus groups, and in particular their answers to the question about what kind of research they would like to see, suggests two possible points of intervention into research. The first is in initial research design, when farmers’ values can suggest directions for research projects, and the second is after research has been conducted, when we frame are findings in ways that will have the most impact with these groups.

How to Use this Research:

The initial findings of our study can be used to help these farmers and encourage them, and through them the public, toward more sustainable practices. The concrete research questions in Table 2 can inform research design early on in the process, as programs and questions are chosen which respond to these farmers' needs. These questions lead naturally to suggestions of research projects that could answer some of their concerns. However, nonscientist members of the public often do not know what research questions will be most likely to bear fruit. If other research questions are pursued, the question becomes how to shape the findings in a way that would make them most relevant to the direct-marketing farmers and the broader community who buys from them. We suggest three questions that researchers may want to ask themselves about their work if they wish to be relevant to the direct marketing community.

At the recommendation of KBS Outreach Coordinator, participants were each handed a stamped, self-addressed envelope at the conclusion of the focus group for thoughts that they did not have the chance to share or that they considered after departing. The group also received emails with summaries of their focus group discussions in order for individuals to comment and to express dissent if the summaries of group values did not reflect their individual values.

Initial findings:

In this section we will address some of what came out of these focus groups, and what it might mean for researchers. By the time the discussions reached the culminating question of

1. How can I design my research so that my conclusions will help direct markets farm more 6

productively, with fewer risks, and in ways that support their communities and their natural environment? Will my study directly or indirectly answer any of the specific questions in Table 2? 2. What conclusions from my study would help farmers realize their goals of farming productively, with fewer risks, and in ways that support their communities and their natural environment? How

can I emphasize these benefits when communicating with this community? 3. Are the recommendations based on my research conclusions realistic for direct marketers farming at smaller scales or farming in nontraditional environments such as urban settings? These questions apply to different phases of research,

Table 2: Concrete Research Questions of Interest to Direct Marketers What are the benefits and costs of participating in cooperative groups (food hubs)? How do programs effectively educate the public about farming? How can young farmers be successful, especially without purchasing a new farm? Community: How can I farm in ways that sustain my community?

How should I compensate my farm workers so that they stay in farming? What institutions should I support to build community resilience? How can I involve marginalized communities that aren’t knowledgeable about farms? How can I best educate new workers on my farm? What are the ideal tasks for involving the community in farm work? How can farmers integrate animals into cropland, and what are the benefits? How should planting beds be shaped and paired to avoid the need for pesticides? How can trees be incorporated into sustainable farming?

Nature: How can I farm in ways that imitate natural processes, protect the environment, and sustain the farm?

How can I integrate permaculture principles into my farming practices? How much of the farm needs to be dedicated to crops for natural mulch? What mulches and cover crops control which pests? Can we selectively breed for plants that are fit for organic and sustainable farms? What are the advantages of various beneficials and how can they be attracted? What native beneficials are threatened and might be supported on farms? How can I reduce the use of plastics on organic farms? How can I prepare for the loss of pollinators? How can I prepare for drought and other effects of climate change?

Security: How can I farm in ways that guard against the risks of an uncertain future?

How does depleted soil impact the nutritional quality of produce? What information should my farm track, and how can I best organize it? What do I need to know about pest life cycles to adaptively respond year-to-year? How can we develop a seed bank for crops that are suited for Michigan farming? Can we selectively breed for plants that are fit for a variable Michigan climate? What are the costs and benefits of permaculture at different time scales?

Productivity: How can I farm in ways that are maximally productive while staying small enough that I can be attentive to all aspects of my farming?

How can I best balance crop-rotation with companion plants? What’s the largest plot size that IPM is still effective and pesticides are avoidable? When are hoop houses more profitable than smaller caterpillar tunnels? How many trees are needed to meet my firewood needs? How can expensive equipment for large farms be scaled down for small farms? When do different alternative energy options become cost-effective? 7

and using these questions to inform research would go a long way to reach out to this community which wants scientific data, and also believes because of its interaction with the public they can play a much more important role in environmental sustainability than the size of the land they cultivate might suggest.

farms and thus may not be fully applicable to the small, multi-crop farms favored by direct marketers. Similarly, LTER at KBS has a long history of researching productivity, and security, and farming in accordance with natural processes. Thus existing KBS research programs, such as those on landscape diversity, could be widened to include in situ crop diversity, which would address the request for research on ecosystem focused farming practices and companion cropping. This research could also be applied to better understand the cultivation of micro-ecosystems useful for farmers intensively cultivating plots between 1-10 acres. Thus research already going on at KBS could provide the basis for future work on questions cataloged under “nature,” “productivity,” and “security.”

Fitting this Research into Existing Institutions: The diversity of research questions, and the diversity of values reflected by these questions, ensures that no single institution is likely to cover every topic of interest to these farmers. Fortunately, many of the specific research questions fit into the missions of existing institutions, and this last section reviews some of these institutions and the sorts of questions they are already engaging. The MSU Student Organic Farm (or SOF) focuses on training students in small-scale, sustainable fruit, vegetable, meat, and flower production. As such, they often use many of the same farming methods and equipment that direct marketers employ. Thus focus group research requests cataloged under the headings “productivity” and “nature,” such as studies focusing on multi-crop rotation, companion plants, the integration of animals into small-scale farming operations, and proper hoop-house management, are either already underway or can be easily implemented at SOF. In addition, SOF could also provide fertile ground for research concerning “community,” as the students and farm managers employ similar approaches to marketing and community engagement.

Finally, MSU (both at KBS and on the main campus) has several sociologists, economists, and anthropologists working on sociological issues concerning agriculture, or those cataloged under “community.” Thus research questions regarding effective marketing and best practices concerning community building are either already being researched by MSU social scientists or could provide fruitful new directions for future research. MSU is in a unique position to address the agriculture science, sociological, and economic questions important to small-scale and direct market farmers, as many of their concerns are context specific to Michigan, though the research would of course have broader implications. Works Cited 1

Bhardwaj, A.K., Jasorita, P., Hamilton, S.K., and Robertson, G.P. (2011). Ecological management of intensively cropped agro-ecosystems improves soil quality with sustained productivity. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 140: 419-429. 2 Poulton, C., Dorward, A., & Kydd, J. (2010). The future of small farms: New directions for services, institutions, and intermediation. World Development,38(10), 1413-1428. 3 Chouinard, H. H., Paterson, T., Wandschneider, P. R. & Ohler, A. M. (2008). Will Farmers Trade Profits for Stewardship? Heterogeneous Motivations for Farm Practice Selection.” Land Economics 84(1): 66-82. 4 Sassenrath, G. F., Halloran, J. M.; Archer, D., Raper, R. L., Hendrickson, J.; Vadas, P., Hanson, J. (2010). Drivers Impacting the Adoption of Sustainable Management Practices and Production Systems of the Northeast and Southeast United States. Journal of Sustainable Agriculture 34: 680-702. 5 Tavernier, E. M., and Tolomeo, V. (2004). Farm Typology and Sustainable Agriculture: Does Size Matter? Journal of Sustainable Agriculture 24.2: 3346. 6 NCSF. “A Time to Act: A Report of the USDA National Commission on Small Farms.” National Commission on Small Farm. U.S. Department of Agriculture.Washington, D.C. 7 U.S. Department of Agriculture. (2007). Census of Agriculture. 8 Michigan Farmers Market Association. (2012). Home page. Michigan Farmers Market Association. Retrieved from mifma.org on August 16, 2013.

In addition, MSU Extension has been providing useful information for farmers over the years, especially in the areas of disease control and pest management. As such, Extension has significant resources available to address questions cataloged under “security,” such as those concerning integrated pest management and multi-crop disease control. However, these resources may not focus on the specific crops favored by small-scale farmers and, for this reason, future research could be preformed to fill such knowledge gaps. In addition, Extension also provides information on productivity. However, while a portion of the information could be utilized by direct marketers, much of it appears to focus on large scale

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