Understanding farmers: From adoption to attitudes

Agriculture contributes significantly to global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, but there are many technologies and practices that have the potential to significantly mitigate these GHG emissions. Technology adoption research, through a better understanding of the individual adoption decision can help policymakers realise this potential via better policy design and targeting. The attitude of potential adopters is one important aspect influencing this decision. Identifying groups or typologies of farmers with similar attitudes and their associated farm/farmer characteristics can inform policy to encourage adoption of GHG mitigation practices. Using new data from a face-to-face nationally representative survey, this paper identifies five farmer typologies based on attitudes towards a range of farming/non-farming issues. It considers their impact on the adoption decision, before identifying underlying farm/farmer characteristics to such farmer typologies to allow for a number of recommendations to help policy design.