Research

INTRODUCTION

In many watersheds across the globe, agricultural chemical runoff often results in the substantial degradation of soil, freshwater, and marine environments (Evans et al. 2019, Wołejko et al. 2020, Zhao et al. 2021). Numerous public and private institutions have goals to restore agricultural watersheds and waterbodies by incentivizing private landowners to adopt agricultural conservation practices (e.g., cover crops, conservation tillage, and riparian buffers) that they otherwise would not undertake (Galloway et al. 2008, Evans et al. 2019). These institutions typically offer financial and technical assistance to farmers for adopting conservation practices, which can reduce nutrient runoff, provide wildlife habitat, and sequester carbon, among other benefits (Palm et al. 2014, Batáry et al. 2015, Read and Wainger 2023). Through such assistance, these institutions aim to achieve sufficiently high rates of adoption to result in watershed-scale improvements to water body condition, aquatic and terrestrial habitat quality, and climate regulation (Ribaudo et al. 2011, Navarro and López-Bao 2018). However, such efforts have largely yielded low to moderate adoption rates (Reimer et al. 2013, Wallander et al. 2021), with some dis-adoption (Sawadgo and Plastina 2022), and have mostly failed to reach their intended regional environmental goals (Shortle et al. 2012, Rabalais and Turner 2019, Ator et al. 2020, Giri 2021).

Research suggests that a key reason for low conservation practice adoption rates is that the application and implementation process take considerable time and money to complete. Exploratory interviews with farmers highlight concerns about the large amount of paperwork, strict practice specifications, and long timelines for implementation (Reimer and Prokopy 2014a, Medina et al. 2020), and interviews with conservation practitioners suggest that much of their work with farmers centers on explaining and helping navigate programmatic rules (Read et al. 2024). These findings are further supported by empirical economic modeling that suggests that adoption rates could increase if transaction costs were reduced, such as by simplifying contracts (McCann and Claassen 2016, Palm-Forster et al. 2016). Similarly, several literature reviews have highlighted how adoption is positively correlated with larger farm sizes and available capital, which further supports the notion that transaction costs are a significant barrier, as these farms would have more capacity to navigate such complexity and implement practices before getting reimbursed (Prokopy et al. 2008, 2019).

In summary, the research suggests that the institutions governing conservation practice adoption may not fit the full diversity of farm and farmer types found in agricultural systems (Lebel et al. 2013, Qiu et al. 2017, Berardo et al. 2019). Institutions are defined here as “sets of rules, decision-making procedures, and programs that define social practices, assign roles to the participants in these practices, and guide interactions among the occupants of individual roles” (Young 2002:5). Farmers’ concerns about agricultural conservation programs can be described in terms of “institutional fit” or the extent to which institutions match the social and ecological context of the problem being addressed (Young 2002, Olsson et al. 2007, Epstein et al. 2024). These interactions align well with a sub-category of institutional fit, known as social fit, which concerns the alignment between institutions and people’s preferences, abilities, and motivations (Epstein et al. 2015). The concept is distinct from the ecological fit of institutions, or the alignment of institutional sectors, geographic boundaries, and decision processes with attributes of ecological systems (Folke et al. 2007). Past research has suggested that social fit can improve when there are sufficient channels through which decision makers at different levels can learn from and cooperate with each other (Acton et al. 2021), or when decision-making processes directly engage resource users (Turner et al. 2018). Such structures include more opportunities for stakeholder interaction, or better distribution of decision-making authority among participants, among other options (Olsson et al. 2007, Ostrom and Cox 2010, Cox 2012, DeCaro and Stokes 2013, Aburto and Gaymer 2018, Ishihara et al. 2021). Social fit can also be improved by structuring formal policy networks to reflect the informal social networks through which information flows (Oh et al. 2004, Meek 2013, Hohbein et al. 2021), such as by allowing community leaders to become part of the formal structure of program implementation.

For institutions governing agricultural water quality, numerous formal changes have been suggested to improve multiple facets of institutional fit and increase agricultural conservation practice adoption rates. In the United States, suggested improvements to the institutions that provide conservation funding have included both incremental and transformative change. For programs administered under the U.S. Farm Bill, incremental changes include making cost-share contracts more flexible (Enloe et al. 2017) and simplifying paperwork (Reimer and Prokopy 2014a, Del Rossi et al. 2021). More transformative suggestions include resolving conflicts between farm income support and conservation goals that include reducing erosion, preserving wildlife habitat, and protecting water quality (Lichtenberg 2014, Spangler et al. 2020). Regarding the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Navarro and López-Bao (2018) suggest allowing greater adaptation of general rules to local conditions and context; in effect, enabling better institutional fit at the local level.

The degree of difficulty of making changes to established institutions is often not acknowledged in the institutional fit literature. Changes of this scale often require substantial time and resources because of institutional inertia and legal barriers (Weible et al. 2012). Although these changes may indeed improve social fit by better aligning the formal rules governing agricultural conservation adoption with stakeholders’ values, expectations, and patterns of resource use, such recommendations are often made without acknowledging the low likelihood that they would be implemented. Their likelihood of implementation is low because formal changes require decision makers with competing goals to negotiate within established institutional frameworks that can be purposefully or practically slow to change (Baumgartner et al. 2009, Weible et al. 2012, Hiedanpää 2013).

In lieu of changing institutions, a growing undercurrent of research has suggested that, in certain cases, the degree of institutional fit depends at least as much on how and through whom people interact with institutions, as it does the design of the institutions themselves (Cleaver and De Koning 2015, Briassoulis 2017). For example, Lejano and Shankar (2013) highlight how, when implementing programs, both program officers and potential beneficiaries improvise and informally adapt program rules and designs to better achieve their shared goals, thereby improving institutional fit without changing the rules themselves. Instead of approaching institutions from a “thin perspective” that examines only formally constituted institutions, this undercurrent examines institutional fit from a “thick perspective” that includes the many informal understandings and practices that evolve in conjunction with efforts to implement the programs of formal institutions (Young 2002). This thick perspective emphasizes how institutional fit is an outcome of the interactions between formal rules, actors who are subject to them, and complementary information institutions comprising actors working to enable timely program success either by addressing contingencies not dealt with in the formal rules or by facilitating the pursuit of individual goals within the formal institutional framework (Helmke and Levitsky 2004, Clement and Amezaga 2013). The relationship between formal and informal institutions has been extensively studied elsewhere, with research detailing how they can either compete with or complement each other given the institutional interplay (Henn 2023) and how some common factors, including insufficient human and financial capacity, can influence the effectiveness of both (Yami et al. 2009). In particular, this literature highlights the role of boundary workers, those who work to satisfy the needs of multiple social groups while establishing a shared understanding among them, in ensuring complementarity between formal and informal institutions (Nel et al. 2016, Wijaya and Offermans 2019). In sum, a thick perspective on institutional fit tries to account for wider context within which institutions operate and the role of individuals working for and with those institutions in determining the extent of fit or misfit.

In agricultural conservation, this thick perspective is represented in an emerging literature, particularly centered in Europe, that examines how agricultural advisors and conservationists work with farmers to find mutually beneficial ways of incorporating conservation practices into their farm operations (Ingram 2008, Bracken and Oughton 2013, Lemos et al. 2014, Vrain and Lovett 2016, Galik and Grala 2017, Hansen et al. 2018, Eanes et al. 2019). These advisors use a myriad of informal practices to connect farmers to the public and private programs offering financial assistance for installing conservation practices. Some practices are as simple as helping farmers understand their eligibility or filling in forms, while others include delegating some responsibilities among business partners or building social acceptance for the knowledge needed to implement conservation practices (Del Corso et al. 2015). For example, Proctor et al. (2012) provide a description from England of how a farmer’s signing of a conservation contract resulted from him informally ceding decision-making authority to his paid advisor, who understood both the farmer’s production priorities and institutional procedures. Such relationships, built on trust, are especially important to program success because the rigidity of policies governing conservation contracts often limits the ability of farmers to see how to adapt their productions to new regulations (Manevska-Tasevska et al. 2021), and constrains much of the ways in which advisors and conservationists can help farmers navigate the programs (Clément et al. 2023).

Given the challenges of large-scale institutional redesign, the importance of informal relationships between conservation practitioners (CPs) and farmers for improving the institutional fit of agricultural conservation assistance programs remains underexplored. In this paper, we begin to address this knowledge gap by providing evidence of how farmers evaluate both agricultural conservation assistance programs and the public and private CPs tasked with implementing those programs. We conducted 132 interviews with farmers across the Chesapeake Bay watershed, USA, which has some of the highest rates of conservation practice adoption in the country but still lags on many environmental goals. We show that the majority of respondents were concerned about the application and funding processes for conservation assistance programs, as well as the impact of conservation practices on their farm operations. Further, we show farmers largely evaluate CPs on their ability to help overcome these barriers, suggesting that they look to CPs to improve the institutional fit of such programs. Last, we provide preliminary evidence that the rate of conservation practice adoption is higher among farmers who (a) work with CPs, and (b) those CPs do a good job of meeting farmers expectations.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Study site

We conducted our research with farmers in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed (CBW) where “agricultural land covers less than a quarter of the bay watershed, but contributes nearly half of the nitrogen and phosphorous reaching the bay” (Ator et al. 2020:817). Since the 1950s, fertilizer and manure application have become major non-point sources of nitrogen and phosphorous runoff, and tillage practices and land cover changes have increased sediment runoff (Kleinman et al. 2019, Noe et al. 2020). Efforts to reduce agricultural runoff have been in place since the early 1980s. In 2010, a regulatory Total Maximum Daily Load was established and reduction goals were allocated by states to all nutrient source sectors (Linker et al. 2013). A mix of mandatory and voluntary policies are currently used to encourage the adoption of agricultural conservation, or best management, practices. There are over one hundred such conservation practices encouraged through these policies, including agronomic practices, such as cover crops and no-till, and structural practices, such as riparian buffers and manure storage facilities, which add financial and time costs to farm management. Conservation practitioners (CPs) from all levels of government and the non- and for-profit sectors work with farmers to promote these practices. CPs employed by the federal government are typically housed in the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which aims to protect natural resources on working lands while maintaining their productivity. A few federal CPs are also housed in other government conservation agencies, such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or U.S. Forest Service. State and local government CPs are most often at state departments of agriculture or soil and water conservation districts, the latter of which have similar goals to NRCS, but are governed by local boards. There are several non-profit organizations that also employ CPs, often with the aim of improving soil and water quality, as well as some for-profit advisory services that sometimes contract with government or non-profit organizations for outreach. However, to date, measured nutrient and sediment fluxes from agricultural lands vary considerably across the CBW, with little indication of a region-wide net reduction in agricultural pollution (Ator et al. 2020, Fisher et al. 2021, Fox et al. 2021).

The amount of land in crop production (largely corn, soybeans, and hay) has steadily increased across the watershed as a whole over the past 30–40 years, though some areas have urbanized as others have expanded farmland acreage (Dewitz and USGS 2021, Mohammadpour and Grady 2023). Animal biomass has similarly increased over the same period, though the proportion of poultry has increased with a notable rise of concentrated chicken feeding operations on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The region’s animal production relies heavily on imported feed grain, leading to an imbalance between manure produced and the area that might beneficially receive manure (Beegle 2013). Therefore, manure is a major source of nitrogen runoff to waterbodies, in addition to other fertilizer losses (Mohammadpour and Grady 2023). The average farm size in the CBW’s main states is smaller (137–180 acres) than the national average of 441 acres (USDA 2017).

Conservation practice implementation in the CBW is governed by overlapping public and private institutions. Technical and financial assistance programs are available at the federal level through the NRCS, and at the state and local levels through soil and water conservation districts (SWCDs). All states in the CBW offer cost-share payments to farmers who implement conservation practices, and Pennsylvania and Virginia also offer tax credits. The proportion of implementation and opportunity costs (i.e., lost production) that are covered by federal and state programs varies from 50 to 100%. Staff from these organizations are available at no cost to help farmers comply with nutrient management regulations, which are required to participate in some states’ cost-share programs. For cost-share programs, CPs help to plan, apply for, and implement diverse conservation practices. However, staff funding levels are highly variable and CBW policy actors have suggested that too few positions and high turnover are impeding practitioners’ ability to assist farmers (CBC 2017). Many farmers implement conservation practices without direct government funding (Royer et al. 2016), by voluntarily implementing practices or working through non-governmental organizations that offer other, often more flexible, financial incentives through their own technical assistance staff. Yet, research suggests that monetary support of practices results in substantial new adoption that would not have happened through voluntary actions alone (Hua et al. 2025), although effects can vary with type of action and other factors (Mezzatesta et al. 2013).

As with most agricultural cost-share programs elsewhere, the CBW programs have numerous requirements to ensure that spending maximizes public environmental benefits but that can create barriers to adoption. A common burden cited by farmers is that reimbursement only occurs after practices are installed and inspected, potentially requiring them to carry loans for major projects. In addition, practices must meet detailed design specifications, such as plant-by dates for cover crops, or minimum distances from water sources for manure storage facilities, that can limit farmer ability to adapt to weather or logistical factors. Applications from farmers to programs are often prioritized using criteria such as the severity of the resource concern, the expected benefits of the practices, and the ratio of project costs to expected benefits. These prioritization criteria tend to favor larger farm operations because of the greater expected benefits of treating more farm acres in one project (Reimer and Prokopy 2014b).

Data collection and analysis

We used a mixed-methods approach for our study. First, we conducted two qualitative analyses to understand the concepts that farmers use to evaluate (a) agricultural conservation assistance programs and (b) CPs. Second, we conducted two quantitative analyses, one to test whether the concepts derived from the qualitative analyses show significant statistical relationships with farmers’ overall evaluations of CPs, and one to test the relationship between farmers evaluation of CPs and the number of conservation practices they reported adopting.

Qualitative analyses: farmers’ conceptions of institutional misfit and expectations of conservation practitioners

The aim of the qualitative analyses was to understand farmers’ criteria for evaluating (1) agricultural conservation assistance programs, and (2) CPs. We elicited their views using a semi-structured interview guide covering farm operation, interactions with CPs, expectations of CPs and the extent to which they were met, and any programmatic barriers preventing CPs from meeting those expectations (Appendix 1).

We created a list of 91 farmers, distributed evenly among Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, using an online database and subject area experts’ knowledge of the farming community (Appendix 1). Between June and August 2020, we emailed and called all farmers listed and conducted phone interviews with those who agreed. We audio recorded all interviews with the consent of the participants and transcribed all audio.

We coded and analyzed interview transcripts to derive two sets of thematic codes, one representing farmers’ concerns about the institutional fit of agricultural conservation assistance programs and the other representing their expectations of CPs. We coded the transcripts using the constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss 1967, Bryant and Charmaz 2007). We operationalized the social subcomponent of institutional fit (Epstein et al. 2015) by focusing on respondents’ expectations of agricultural conservation assistance programs and CPs, and whether they were met. We did this by tagging segments of text in which the respondent provided an evaluative statement about their experience with the programs or CPs, such as, “That worked out really well,” “I feel like I don’t really get that,” or implicit phrases that conveyed similar meanings, such as “It requires some patience.” Open coding was iterative; when we identified an evaluative statement, we compared it to previously coded statements to see whether it was novel, conflicting, or a variant of previously coded concept (see Appendix 1 for interim stage of coding). During open coding, codes related to the programs were kept distinct from those relating to CPs. As the concepts began to stabilize, we wrote short descriptions, or memos, summarizing their meaning and (dis)similarity to other concepts. When new concepts stopped appearing, we began theoretical coding by creating hierarchical categories relating the concepts to each other. We iteratively revised the memos to ensure category alignment and aggregated detailed theoretical categories under a unifying core category. We conducted all analysis in R version 4.1.2 (R Core Team 2022) with the RQDA package 0.3-1 (Huang 2018).

Quantitative analyses: testing relationships between qualitative categories, farmers’ overall assessments of conservation practitioners, and conservation practices adopted

We conducted two different types of statistical analyses to analyze our combined qualitative and quantitative data. First, we assessed the power of the concepts within the qualitative framework for explaining variability in the performance grades that farmers gave to conservation practitioners. Second, we tested whether the number of conservation practices reported to be adopted by respondents was explained by (a) whether they met with a CP, and (b) if so, the extent to which that CP met their expectations.

We conducted a second round of structured phone interviews with Maryland farmers in September–November 2020 to develop data used to assess CP performance (see Read et al. 2021 for details on sampling and data collection). This sample was selected from lists of (1) farmers who market directly to customers and (2) large commodity producers who received federal subsidies. We sampled both groups because farmers that direct-market can have distinct motivations for adopting conservation practices (Ranjan et al. 2019) and because large commodity-producing operations are more likely to adopt agricultural conservation practices (Prokopy et al. 2019). We contacted all farmers on the directories that advertise producers to consumers, and we randomly selected two farmers per Maryland county, one each who received a corn and a wheat subsidy, from a federal farm subsidy database (Environmental Working Group 2020). We then contacted these farmers up to 3 times via email and phone to set up phone interviews.

During interviews, we asked farmers open-ended questions about what expectations they had of CPs and asked them to assign an overall grade of their impression of how well CPs met those expectations, using a range from A to F, excluding those farmers who had not met with a CP. We coded their stated expectations of CPs using the aggregated (second level) categories from the qualitative analysis of interviews with the first set of farmers from the CBW. We assigned directions to these categories representing whether the farmer mentioned them in a predominantly positive or negative sense. In testing our qualitatively-derived categories, we hypothesized that positive mentions of the categories would increase the likelihood of respondents giving a higher overall grade to CPs.

To test this hypothesis, we fit two proportional odds regression models with a cumulative logistic link function to their responses (McCullagh 1980, Liu and Agresti 2005). In both models, we used an ordinal dependent variable to represent respondents’ overall grades given to conservation practitioners and programs. Both models took the form:

(1)

where Y is a c-category ordinal dependent variable, the grade given to CPs, and α_j is the parameter of the cut points between grades. In both models, the independent variable x is a vector of the categories of expectations derived from the qualitative analysis where a given category is represented by value of +1 and -1 if a theme was discussed in a positive or negative sense and 0 if not discussed. Only model 1 included attributes of the farm operation (Table 1). We assessed our models using surrogate residuals (Liu and Zhang 2018), tested for endogeneity using the two-stage residual inclusion method (Terza 2018), the proportional odds assumption using a likelihood ratio test (Liu et al. 2023) and compared AIC values. We conducted all analysis in R using the ordinal; package 2019.12-10 (Christensen 2019) and sure package 0.2.0 (Greenwell et al. 2017).

During the second round of interviews with Maryland farmers, we also asked about their farm operation and use of conservation practices. We used these data to conduct two exploratory analyses to test the relationship between the number of conservation practices that respondents reported adopting and (a) whether they met with a CP, and (b) if so, how well the CP met their expectations. Using a two-sample t-test, we tested for significant differences in the mean number of conservation practices adopted by respondents who had met a CP and those who had not. We also visually inspected boxplots of the number of conservation practices adopted and the grade that respondents gave CPs. Because of small sample size, we were unable to perform a statistical test for this latter analysis.

RESULTS

Results are divided into four sections representing two qualitative analyses and two quantitative analyses. The qualitative analyses categorized the concepts farmers use to evaluate (1) agricultural conservation assistance programs, and (2) conservation practitioners (CPs). The results of our analysis, detailed below, suggests that farmers primarily evaluate CPs on their ability to overcome shortcomings in the design of the conservation programs, which largely pertained to the application and funding process and the impact of conservation adoption on the farm operation (Fig. 1). In the quantitative analysis, we tested whether the categories described in the preceding analyses show significant statistical relationships with farmers’ overall assessments or grades of conservation practitioners, and whether those grades related to the number of conservation practices that respondents reported adopting.

Qualitative analysis 1: farmers’ evaluations of conservation programs

The resulting sample for the exploratory analysis included 31 farmers, of which 22 were men and 9 were women (34% response rate). Ten respondents were from 8 Maryland counties, 14 were from 5 Pennsylvania counties, and 7 were from 7 Virginia counties. The reported acres operated ranged from 14 to 2240, and their reported farm products included dairy, beef, small ruminants, poultry, eggs, vegetables, corn, wheat, and soybeans, among others. All reported having implemented some conservation practices, including cover crops, rotational grazing, no-till, manure storage facilities, and riparian buffers, with the help of practitioners from NRCS, SWCDs, non-profit organizations, extension, and/or private consultancies.

Respondents described two main shortcomings of the conservation program designs: (1) the difficulty of the application and funding process, and (2) the resulting impact of the practices on their farm operations. Both main shortcomings contained three specific sub-concerns (Table 2).

Concerns about application and funding process

Respondents were concerned with three aspects of the application and funding process for conservation practices: (1) its speed and ease, (2) its degree of flexibility, and (3) how applications are prioritized. The most often cited concern was the speed and ease of the application and funding process. One respondent, describing farmers’ ideal expectations, said “They see they got an issue, and they’re like, ‘I want to fix that.’ And they want to do it in the next two to three weeks.”^[1] Another respondent contrasted this ideal with the actual speed of the process, saying, “To go through some of those programs, until you get an engineer, get on the list, get out and get it all done, and then wait for funding until you can get it, you can be talking two years down the road.” The main impediment slowing the process, as described by the respondents, was the amount of paperwork required. To avoid paperwork, some farmers pursued programs with non-profits, because, as one said, “Sometimes it’s easier than working with government ... you know, a few less hoops to jump through.” But more often, respondents suggested that the long delays would simply deter farmers from applying altogether. One said, “One of the reasons that sometimes you see people not participate in a program is because they know that money’s going to be slow.”

Half the respondents voiced concern about the rigidity with which practices had to be managed and designed in order to be funded. Some described how the rules for managing practices did not fit the diversity of production systems. For example, one respondent said that the rules for managing a forested riparian buffer would have led him to lose his organic certification, saying, “They have this ‘one shoe fits all sizes’ with CREP^[2] as far as how you manage that area ... Because I was certified organic, I wasn’t going to go spray [herbicides to control weeds].” Similarly, another respondent said, “We don’t take part in the cover crop cost-shares because the rules are, in my view, misguided about application times. They don’t give enough flexibility for the farmers.” Respondents’ other concern about program flexibility was the rigidity with which practices were designed, which many thought were excessive and made the practices more expensive. As one respondent explained, “A lot of the design is really over-designed ... NRCS will come out and design something that’s incredibly expensive for you to do because they have to ... They’re limited by their own regs and, really what you’re looking for is a simple solution.”

Respondents’ last concern about the application and funding process was how the method used to prioritize funding proposals in a cost-efficient way affects their interactions with CPs and privileges some farm attributes over others. Some respondents felt as though the process prioritized the most egregious situations, with one imitating a CP by saying, “This guy doesn’t really need much help. We’re not calling him back. We’re going to call the guy that’s got the DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] breathing down his throat because he’s spreading manure in the winter last year.” Some small farmers perceived that large acreage farms were prioritized over small farms. One respondent explained, “They go for what they call the biggest bang for the buck. So, they’d rather give cover crop to someone who’s got 10,000 acres than to give cover crop to 20 beginning farmers with five acres.” He went on to explain that, given the lower profit margins of smaller farms, reimbursements for cover crop seed have greater financial implications for smaller farmers, despite them not being prioritized in the ranking process.

Concerns about impact of conservation on farm operation

Respondents’ other main concern with the conservation programs was the potential impact of the practices on their farm operation. Three specific program concerns were raised: (1) financial burden, (2) whether farmers think practice addresses the on-farm resource concern, and (3) the compatibility of the practice with production priorities.

Farmers described substantial cost burdens of adoption because materials and labor expenses are only reimbursed after installation and inspection, which can take significant time. Smaller farms with more narrow profit-margins were particularly sensitive to this problem. One such farmer said, “When you have to shell out that hundred thousand dollars up front, put in all the infrastructure up front, and then wait for a period of time for it to be inspected, reviewed, and the payment to be distributed, it can be cost prohibitive.” Even for larger-scale farmers, particularly expensive practices, such as manure storage facilities and forested buffers, can still be financially burdensome to farmers, with one noting how, “The ballpark $20,000 that we spent on this project [not reimbursed], there’s other things that money could have gone towards, you know? Other uses that probably could have made a bigger impact on our bottom line.”

Respondents’ second major concern was whether a practice addresses their on-farm resource concerns. As one respondent said, “the expectation is that whatever the project is setting out to do, that will have a positive result.” Another farmer, who had implemented a grassed waterway, mentioned how this expectation was not met, saying, “The challenge was over time, there became a ridge along the fence line between the pastured fields and the waterway. I guess a little berm ... that did not allow water from the pasture to flow into the waterway. And so the pasture stayed wet. And it just didn’t function very well.”

The last major concern that respondents had about the impact of conservation practices on their farm operation was the extent to which new practices were compatible with continued production. Respondents felt that some practices eased their farm management, with one remarking, “It’s definitely a huge advantage going no-till and doing a cover crop ... It’s a lot of time and energy saved.” However, another respondent said that future financial sustainability was rarely accounted for in planning, stating, “I see them funding projects and ... I’m like, ‘Holy shit, how is that ever going to turn a profit?’” As one respondent succinctly put it, “I’m all about doing the right things for conservation and the environment, water, air quality, et cetera. However, they have to go hand in hand with being able to sustain our farm too.”

Qualitative analysis 2: farmers’ expectations of conservation practitioners

Against this backdrop of farmers’ concerns about the conservation programs, we investigated their expectations of CPs. The core category that emerged from the analysis and that best describes those expectations is “Achieving fit.” This core category describes how farmers expected CPs to address their concerns with the conservation assistance programs and match those programs to their farm contexts. Within this core category, farmers’ three main expectations of CPs were to (1) share knowledge of relevant programs, practices, and policies, (2) understand farmers’ individual operations, issues, and goals, and (3) be professional while doing so (Table 3).

Expectations for sharing relevant knowledge

Farmers’ first expectation of CPs was that they effectively share knowledge about programs, policies, and conservation practices that are applicable to the farmers with whom they are working. “Sharing Relevant Knowledge” consisted of four concepts, (1) willingness and ability to assist with applications, (2) readily suggesting relevant programs and practices, (3) being available and accessible to farmers and (4) having unbiased, research-based knowledge.

Respondents’ most often cited expectation of CPs was their willingness and ability to help navigate and complete the application and funding process. Assessments of their ability to help were fairly straight-forward, with one farmer recalling, “They helped us fill out, fill in the forms for cost-share. They did exactly what they were supposed to do.” Respondents’ characterized CPs’ willingness to help based on the effort they expended to make sure farmers could access the right information. For instance, one respondent remarked favorably about his CP interaction, “I always assume ... [there will be some] people who are really trying and helpful, and then people who are - just have to have a job and don’t really care ... I don’t think we’ve ever had someone who just was very nonchalant, doesn’t really care or anything.” Overall, respondents saw a helpful, rather than bureaucratic, attitude as an important part of CPs sharing their knowledge and achieving fit between the programs and individual farms.

The second concept within Sharing Relevant Knowledge was that farmers expected CPs to contact them about relevant programs and practices and to match programs to farm conditions and farmer capacities. Several respondents said that CPs had made them aware of programs through newsletters, email lists, bulk text messages, or in-person. Some also suggested the importance of tailoring these messages to farmers, such as a respondent who said, “They’re very good about that, saying that ‘Hey, this program would apply to you. You ought to be trying it, or sign up for it.’” Respondents often acknowledged that their operations had shortcomings that they expected CPs to address. For instance, a respondent said of a CP, “She was really good at just kind of coming up with what would fit for us and be manageable for us.” Respondents also largely appreciated CPs who pointed out problems that were not obvious to them. One farmer said she would appreciate more ideas because “I didn’t even know that there were places on my land that I shouldn’t be grazing animals.”

Respondents related their third expectation about CPs’ ability to share knowledge, being available and accessible, to two factors. The first was the CP’s prior relationship with the farmer, as many respondents mentioned a CP by name who they are able to call or text and get a reply within minutes. Those respondents who did not have such prior relationships discussed availability as a function of the level of outreach done in their area, with many saying that they struggled to learn who they should contact because no outreach had been done.

Respondents’ final expectation of CPs ability to share relevant knowledge, though expressed by a smaller number of respondents (~13%), was about CPs’ access to unbiased, research-based knowledge, particularly in extension. One respondent succinctly said, “I like objective research.” Some respondents contrasted this objective knowledge with what they described as biased knowledge coming from the private sector. As one respondent put it, “I don’t want Monsanto telling me that their chemicals are the best thing to do ... If it comes from Penn State or Ohio State or whoever, saying that, ‘Hey, Monsanto has a chemical that does this and this and this,’ then I’ll believe that.”

Expectations for understanding farm context

Farmers expected conservation practitioners to learn about their specific farm context. This category included two concepts affecting CP’s ability to do so: (1) understanding farmer vision and (2) the CP’s depth and breadth of practical farming knowledge.

The core of understanding the farm context is the extent to which CPs understand farmers’ visions for their land. This concept is well illustrated by a farmer who compared a bad experience with NRCS to a good experience with her SWCD:

When NRCS came out, I felt like they were wanting to be very prescriptive. And they’re like, “Oh, well, you could do this, and you could do that. And have you thought about this?” And I was like, “Look, I have a vision for the farm. This is what I want to do. How can you help me achieve it?” And when Jane came out from [the soil] conservation [district], she was like, “Really, just talk to me about your farm. Tell me what you do here. What are your resource concerns? What do you think?” And was just really open and let me kind of drive the conversation.

This example shows how the farmer found the key distinction between bad and good experiences with CPs to be whether they take time to first learn about the farmers’ vision and goals before suggesting conservation practices.

Farmers also saw CPs’ depth and breadth of practical farming knowledge as a key factor of their ability to understand the farm context. This concept differs from “Sharing Relevant Knowledge” above, which emphasized knowledge about programs, policies, and practices, in that, here, farmers were more concerned with whether CPs had the practical farming knowledge to understand main operational concerns. This expectation is particularly important given that not all CPs have farmed or come from an agricultural background. Although many have been educated in environmental science, for some, working as CPs has been their first exposure to agriculture, which has important implications for their ability to understand the farm context. As one farmer described, “I value somebody who has done it and shown that it works far more than what somebody tells me because that’s what your research is.” Without that practical experience, farmers were unsure about whether CPs were accounting for the financial risk inherent in farming. As one respondent put it, “If there was something that I could want to see change, there would be NRCS personnel [that] actually understand the economics of nutrients for a farmer.”

Expectations for being professional

Farmers also evaluated conservation practitioners on their level of professionalism, which included expectations for being respectful and following through on their stated commitments. However, these expectations were not always met. One small-scale farmer reported that CPs pejoratively referred to him as a “hobby farmer” and that they only help larger-scale farms. Additionally, two women farmers described sexism in their work with male CPs, in that the practitioners talked down to them, assuming they did not have the same expertise as men. Both suggested that working with female CPs results in more “synergy,” a better understanding of the farm by CPs, and a decreased likelihood of discrimination. The other way that respondents evaluated the professionalism of CPs was whether they followed through on their commitments. The farmers who mentioned this issue did so by saying, “They never made a promise that they couldn’t just keep,” or “The different organizations I’ve worked with, they for the most part lived up to what they promised me.”

Summary of qualitative analyses 1 and 2

Qualitative analysis 1 suggests that farmers’ concerns about the conservation programs center on the (1) application and funding process, and (2) impact of conservation programs on the farm operations. Qualitative analysis 2 suggests that farmers expect CPs to “achieve fit” by (1) sharing relevant knowledge, (2) understanding the farm direction, and (3) being professional. Together, the two analyses point to how, in meeting farmers’ expectations, CPs can help address some of farmers’ concerns about conservation programs (Fig. 2). Whether the work of CPs in doing so is sufficient to nullify these concerns is unclear. Moreover, some aspects of the conservation programs, such as program and practice flexibility and project prioritization, are left unaddressed by the work of CPs. But the analyses indicate that most of farmers’ concerns can be, at least partly, addressed by CPs who meet their expectations.

Quantitative analysis 1: Achieving fit distinguishes better and worse experiences with CPs

We interviewed a second sample of farmers both to test the transferability of the framework developed from the initial qualitative analysis and to assess the relative importance of the concepts for explaining variability in farmers’ overall assessments of conservation practitioners. For this round, we contacted 477 farmers, and interviewed 101 (21.2% response rate). Of the responses retained in the analysis, 79 (78.2%) farmers reported some recent interaction with a CP. All these respondents had adopted one or more conservation practices. They were distributed across 21 Maryland counties. Forty-three (54.4%) reported producing some kind of livestock or poultry, 37 (46.8%) reported producing vegetables, and 43 (54.4%) reported producing either corn, soybean, or hay. The mean acres reported under production were 256, slightly higher than the state average of 161 acres (NASS 2017), and ranged from 1 to 2400.

Respondents generally had favorable assessments of their interactions with CPs, with 36 (45.6%) giving an A and 26 (32.9%) giving a B. These overall grades varied across farmers’ expectations about Sharing Relevant Knowledge, Understanding Farm Context, and Being Professional (Fig. 3). Thirty-six (45.6%) respondents mentioned the application and funding process, and only two did so in a positive way. Because this category had low variation, we excluded it from the following statistical analysis. Similarly, we excluded respondents’ considerations of the impact of the program on their farm operations because only 9 (8.9%) respondents mentioned it. Those who did were split, with five mentioning it positively and four negatively.

The regression models suggested that a farmer positively mentioning a CP’s ability to share relevant knowledge and be professional significantly increased the likelihood of that farmer giving the CP a higher overall grade (Table 4). These two variables were significant (p < 0.001, p < 0.01, respectively) and had large positive coefficient values in both models. We did not find that positive mentions of the other category of “Achieving fit,” Understanding Farm Context, were significant in either model. Models 1 and 2 had similar results despite the omission of farm characteristics as independent variables in Model 2. All farm operation and funding source characteristics were insignificant in Model 1, including tenure, whether adopted practices took land out of production, and funding sources. The goodness of fit tests and AIC values suggest that Model 2 fit the data slightly better than model 1. Surrogate residuals for both models appear normal, suggesting valid model inference, and no evidence against the proportional odds assumption or of endogeneity was detected (Appendix 1).

Quantitative analysis 2: preliminary positive association between better experiences with CPs and number of conservation practices adopted

Of the 101 respondents, 79 reported having met a CP and 22 reported having not (Fig. 4a). Of those who had met a CP, the mean number of conservation practices reportedly adopted was 4.487 (range: 1–11). Of those who had not met a CP, the same mean was 2.864 (range: 0–7). We performed a two-sample t-test to examine whether the mean number of conservation practices reportedly adopted significantly differed between these two groups. With 32.975 degrees of freedom, a p-value of 0.00434 and a confidence interval of (-2.702, -0.545), our results suggest that those respondents who did meet a CP had also adopted significantly more conservation practices than those who did not.

Of the 79 respondents who did meet with a CP, we visually inspected boxplots of the number of conservation practices adopted by the grade they gave CPs (Fig. 4b). Because of sparse data in the lower grade categories, we could not perform an ANOVA test to see if the mean number of conservation practices reportedly adopted significantly differed by grade. However, with higher medians and interquartile ranges among the higher grades, the boxplots offer preliminary evidence that those who gave higher grades to CPs adopted more conservation practices.

DISCUSSION

Our results suggest that farmers perceive significant areas of institutional misfit within agricultural conservation assistance programs in the Chesapeake Bay watershed (CBW), and that they look to CPs to partly overcome this misfit. Three main categories of farmers’ expectations of CPs to achieve fit emerged from the qualitative analysis: sharing relevant knowledge about the programs, policies, and practices; understanding the farm context; and doing both in a professional manner. By meeting these expectations, CPs can, at least partly, address some of farmers’ concerns about the conservation programs. The quantitative analysis demonstrated a high positive correlation between CPs sharing relevant knowledge and being professional with farmers’ overall satisfaction with their work, independent of farm type. Further, we found preliminary evidence that interacting with a CP, and in particular a CP who meets farmers’ expectations, may be positively associated with the number of conservation practices that farmers adopt. Together these results suggest that in lieu of expensive and time-intensive redesigns of formal agricultural conservation assistance programs, the social fit of such programs can be enhanced via the relationships between CPs and farmers and the extent to which the former meets the latter’s expectations.

Given that implementing any formal changes to institutions will take substantial time and effort, CPs appear to be an effective and feasible solution for making progress on environmental goals by reducing the effort necessary for farmers to navigate complex programs. “Sharing Relevant Knowledge” was (1) the most frequently mentioned concept, (2) the most likely concept to be mentioned positively by respondents in the second sample, and (3) showed strong evidence of a large, positive effect of farmers positively mentioning this concept with their overall satisfaction with CPs’ work in both regression models. These results suggest both the importance of this concept for “Achieving fit” and that CPs are generally performing well in this regard within the CBW. “Understanding Farm Context” was the second most frequently mentioned concept of farmer expectations, but we found no evidence in either model that positive mentions of this concept were associated with farmers’ overall satisfaction with CPs’ work. Two possibilities could explain this lack of association. First, the small sample size could mean that our models did not have adequate statistical power to detect the effect of this concept. Second, in contrast to “Sharing Relevant Knowledge” and “Being Professional,” “Understanding Farm Context” did not address any concerns that farmers had about the application and funding process (Fig. 2). It could be that farmers weigh the application and funding process more heavily than the impact of conservation on their farm operations when evaluating the work of CPs. However, with so little variation among farmers’ concerns about the conservation programs, we were unable to include their thoughts about the application and funding process in our models. Most importantly, if our preliminary evidence of a positive correlation between farmers’ evaluations of CPs and the number of conservation practices they adopt is accurate, improving CPs’ ability to meet farmers’ expectations could yield measurable improvements in conservation adoption rates. This could be achieved through changes to the U.S. Farm Bill that expand funding for federal conservation practitioners, which has remained relatively flat in recent years (Oliver and Gazal 2021, Rosenberg and Wallander 2022). Separately, enhancing the work of CPs and redesigning institutions are likely insufficient for achieving any kind of “full” institutional fit that would more thoroughly advance water quality goals. A more comprehensive solution appears to require adapting institutional designs while also supporting CPs in their work to overcome barriers.

Further, we propose that the institutional literature should dedicate more attention to how informal institutions shape social fit by influencing the interaction between the institutional and scientific knowledge of CPs and the practical knowledge of farmers. Our findings, particularly farmers’ categories of “Sharing Relevant Knowledge” and “Understanding Farm Context,” corroborate previous studies that underscore the importance of integrating diverse knowledge systems to improve social fit (Juntti and Potter 2002, Clement 2013, Aburto and Gaymer 2018). Similar to CPs, several studies have highlighted the crucial role of knowledge brokers and boundary workers. These individuals facilitate the sharing and translation of different knowledge types between groups, leading to a better alignment with the social context (Tisenkopfs et al. 2015, Honeck et al. 2021, Koontz 2021). Reframing the concept of institutional fit to incorporate these informal institutions and acknowledge the capacity of field-level practitioners to integrate diverse knowledge can provide more immediately actionable recommendations for improving the fit of conservation programs (e.g., Ingram 2008, Proctor et al. 2012). This approach can be pursued concurrently while considering alternative institutional designs and processes.

Apart from our main finding that CPs are an important component of improving the social fit of agricultural conservation assistance programs in the CBW, our findings revealed several formal institutional changes that could improve the social fit of agricultural conservation practice programs in the CBW. Within the second sample of farmers, nearly everyone (~94%) who mentioned the application and funding process when describing their evaluation of the programs and practitioners did so negatively. Their responses were so uniformly negative that we had to exclude that variable from the statistical analysis because of the lack of variability. Importantly, farmers did not look to CPs to address two of the three aspects of the application and funding process about which they had concerns: the flexibility of program funding and practice design and the way in which projects are prioritized. These two aspects are largely beyond CPs ability to influence, and hinder any substantial negotiation or adaptation that CPs are able to make to other aspects of the conservation programs. Some NGOs do offer more flexible funding opportunities and practice designs to help ameliorate these issues with government programs, but the extent to which their flexibility addresses farmers’ concerns is unknown. Similarly, based on our results, program changes to improve social fit could include reducing the amount of paperwork, increasing the speed at which farmers receive payments, and making the design standards for practices more flexible to fit a diversity of farm production types. These suggestions are consistent with other recent findings on farmers’ impediments to conservation practice adoption in the CBW (Fox et al. 2021) and with recommendations for future changes to the U.S. Farm Bill (Reimer and Prokopy 2014a, McCann and Claassen 2016, Enloe et al. 2017, Del Rossi et al. 2021). They are also consistent with past formal changes to Maryland’s cover crops program, which saw higher adoption rates following increased cost-share payment levels and program flexibility (Bowman and Lynch 2019). Although these changes are challenging to implement, it is likely that they would remove several barriers in the application and funding process and increase conservation adoption rates.

However, acting on some of these recommendations from farmers may present a trade-off between enhancing social fit at the possible detriment of ecological fit (Young 2002, Bodin et al. 2014). Many farmers reported that conservation program design features were burdensome. However, some of the detailed design requirements and management specifications that many farmers found to be mismatches for their farm context were designed to fit particular ecological problems. For example, some farmers disliked having plant-by dates in the cover crop programs, but those rules were instituted when research showed that late planting dramatically reduced the effectiveness of cover crops (Lee et al. 2016, Hively et al. 2020). Similarly, small farmers thought program elements that prioritized use of resources (CP time and funding) for large farms with major nutrient runoff concerns were unfair but such emphasis is likely to improve the cost-effectiveness of the program. A testable issue, that is rarely analyzed, is whether adapting institutions to be more flexible, and thereby encourage more farmers to adopt conservation practices, would offset any reductions in efficiency of practices at reducing nutrient runoff.

Formal changes in institutions could be evaluated in terms of their ability to maximize social and ecological fit through a balance of somewhat more flexible regulations and policies. For example, enhanced practice design flexibility could increase overall adoption but needs to be evaluated for effects on net environmental improvement and program cost-effectiveness to identify any trade-offs. More generally, analysis is needed to systematically assess social and ecological fit under alternative CP behavior, adoption patterns, or program rules. The net outcome of program changes can defy expectations. Some research suggests that program rules that promote cost-effectiveness, but that farmers perceive as unfair, can dramatically reduce overall program participation (Narloch et al. 2013). Similarly, some evidence suggests that pay-for-performance programs, which should promote innovation, can reduce farmer participation, likely because of the higher barrier to entry (Palm-Forster et al. 2016).

Despite the lack of national representativeness of our sample, farm characteristics did not appear to explain differences in responses, suggesting that many of the institutional concerns we outline here are likely to be present across the country. Farming in the CBW differs from that nationally, having smaller average farm sizes, and being under specific regulations and pressures stemming from mandated federal watershed restoration targets. Further, we oversampled farmers who sell directly to consumers and all respondents in the second sample were adopters. Safety precautions during the COVID-19 pandemic also necessitated that we collect data remotely, with uncertain effects on validity of results. Future research could explore whether our results from phone interviews are consistent with observational fieldwork or large surveys and ranking exercises. Further, this exploratory work was unable to test causality between CPs meeting farmers expectations and conservation practice adoption, leaving open the possibility of a reverse influence in which greater adoption improves farmers’ working relationships with CPs. Last, because our sample size was small and non-random, we cannot say if there are certain subgroups among farmers who have different experiences and expectations of conservation programs and practitioners. Evidence from outside the CBW suggests that farm advisory services are not equitably available or distributed across all farmers (Labarthe et al. 2022). The perspectives of those farmers who are “underserved” are not captured here, but may enrich our findings by suggesting further ways that the social fit of conservation programs could improve.

CONCLUSIONS

We found that farmers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed (CBW) perceive major problems with agricultural conservation program designs and expect conservation practitioners (CPs) to help overcome the institutional misfit between programs and farmer capabilities and expectations. Our qualitative results suggested that farmers expected CPs to navigate difficult application processes and identify relevant program opportunities to overcome program complexity. Our quantitative results suggested that the ability of practitioners to effectively share the most relevant program knowledge and to be professional strongly influenced whether they met farmers’ expectations of achieving fit. Farmers growing different products and with different farm sizes were similar in how they evaluated CPs, suggesting these results are potentially transferable across farm types. Further, we found preliminary evidence that working with a CP, and particularly one who successfully meets farmers’ expectations, is positively associated with the number of conservation practices a farmer has adopted.

Overall, our analysis suggests that although not a complete substitute for formal changes to institutions, conservation practitioners play a crucial role in achieving institutional fit by aligning farmer and program goals. Simple actions by practitioners, such as taking sufficient time to help farmers navigate the application and funding process and identifying methods to overcome practical constraints, have the potential to improve institutional fit and increase rates of practice adoption within the CBW. Although about 80% of farmers in our second sample (n = 79) gave an A or B grade to practitioners, our results provide guidance for training a more effective team of practitioners. The key results were that farmers gave higher grades to practitioners that shared relevant information about programs and practices and treated farmers with respect. Importantly, CPs are clearly contributing to adoption of conservation practices by farmers who count on them to overcome institutional misfit. Additional research into agricultural adoption that views conservation practitioners as resolvers of conflicts may add to understanding of methods to increase conservation practice adoption rates and where added program flexibility can increase program cost-effectiveness by increasing participation without sacrificing environmental outcomes.

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^[1] All quotes are exact, excluding some filler words, such as “like” and “you know.”
^[2] The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) is a program through the Natural Resources Conservation Service, in which the federal government rents private land and uses it for conservation purposes.

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