Abstract
This paper analyses spatial dependence and determinants of the New Zealand dairy farmers’ adoption of best management practices to protect water quality. A Bayesian spatial durbin probit model is used to survey data collected from farmers in the Waikato region of New Zealand. The results show that farmers located near each other exhibit similar choice behaviour, indicating the importance of farmer interactions in adoption decisions. The results also address that information acquisition is the most important determinant of farmers’ adoption of best management practices. Financial problems are considered a significant barrier to adopting best management practices. Overall, the existence of distance decay effect and spatial dependence in farmers’ adoption decisions highlights the importance of accounting for spatial effects in farmers’ decision-making, which emerges as crucial to the formulation of sustainable agriculture policy.
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Notes
A Meshblock is defined as the smallest geographic unit for which statistical data is collected by Statistics NZ. Meshblocks vary in size from part of a city block to large areas of rural land.
Water bodies used to calculate the distance from farms to water bodies are refer to observable streams, rivers, and lakes in Google map with the scale of 1:8000 that is seen as an appropriate scale to see small road (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Zoom_levels).
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank DairyNZ for providing the survey data for this study. We would like to thank for the two anonymous reviwers for their valuable comments.
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Wei Yang now works at AgResearch Ltd Lincoln Research Centre as a farm economist.
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Yang, W., Sharp, B. Spatial Dependence and Determinants of Dairy Farmers’ Adoption of Best Management Practices for Water Protection in New Zealand. Environmental Management 59, 594–603 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-017-0823-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-017-0823-6