Opportunities and challenges for the adoption and sustainability performance of alternative agricultural practices at the regional level: Agri-environment schemes and ecological farming approaches in England

The ability of alternative 'ecological' farming approaches and agri-environment schemes (AES) to deliver on sustainability goals will depend on their adoption rate and distribution at the regional level, which is a neglected topic in the agricultural literature, which focuses primarily on farm-level factors. Filling this gap is especially relevant to agriculture in England following Brexit, which prompted a reform of agri-environment policy with greater emphasis on 'public money for public goods', and landscape-scale actions. The aim of this thesis was to use an interdisciplinary approach to assess challenges and opportunities for the adoption of alternative farming approaches and AES to impact regional sustainability, focusing on English agriculture post Brexit. Semi-structured interviews were used to examine farmer drivers of adoption at the farm level and beyond by asking farmers about their willingness to identify as public good providers, and their relationship with cooperative management for public good delivery. Spatial analysis was used to assess the regional distribution of AES engagement and test the role of possible factors in explaining this distribution. Finally, a mix of scenario analysis, qualitative impact mapping, and network analysis was used for a sustainability assessment of ecological farming approaches, exploring how their adoption rate and distribution relates to their regional sustainability.

The interviews illustrated how farmers chose their own interpretations of 'public goods' to fit with their views about what being a farmer meant. By defining public goods as being 'good for the public', farmers could connect their willingness to be seen as providers of public goods to a desire for the public to properly recognise the value of outputs from farming. Farmer attitudes towards public good provision also reflected how they reconciled private and public good provision with their chosen identities, whether these were separate aspects of their identity that had to weighed against each other, or interdependent features of their role. Respondents often preferred to focus on public good delivery at the farm level due to the perceived costly and onerous nature of cooperative management, and the lack of any obvious reward for their efforts, highlighting the importance of quantifying and communicating the benefits of cooperative management for its widespread adoption. A tendency of farmers to be mistrustful of institutional control means successful cooperative initiatives must have a strong farmer-driven component, but the distribution of participating farms will likely depend on the occurrence of farmers who are able to make new connections with others (who may not necessarily share views or ideals around good farming) and thus facilitate the creation of loose farmer clusters.

The application of spatial analysis and modelling showed that AES distribution in England was clustered at the district level, and these cluster locations differed for different scheme types. Protected area coverage was consistently positively associated with regional adoption rates, but the impact of other explanatory variables varied according to the scheme type. Modelling also indicated that a mix of other, unidentified spatially correlated variables were likely driving a large part of the observed clustering, and that this clustering was unlikely to be due to any form of spillover or neighbourhood effect, as might be expected at a more local level.

Finally, the sustainability assessment demonstrated how the adoption of locally appropriate ecological farming approaches (in this case conservation agriculture and low-input farming) could enhance regional sustainability in southeast England. Sustainability performance was maximised in scenarios where the adoption of these approaches occurred at a high rate and in a clustered distribution. The high clustered adoption scenario could reconcile positive performance across many different aspects of sustainability, although even in this scenario it was not possible to completely avoid trade-offs or resolve all ambiguities between different sustainability objectives. Applying network analysis to the scenarios highlighted the importance of information access for the regional sustainability of ecological approaches, which in turn depended on strong advisory support, use of technology, and quality of farmer social relationships.

Taken together, these methods show how the processes underpinning the adoption and sustainability of ecological farming and AES may vary across different scales, and that the regional sustainability of an ecological approach depends on the geographic context in which it is applied. Utilising the full diversity of ecological approaches and ensuring that farmers can be supported to adopt locally relevant approaches, will be important for optimising regional sustainability, as will an increased emphasis on mechanisms for information sharing and building relationships with and within farming communities. Given that the sustainability of ecological farming appears to be the product of processes operating at different scales, multi-scale assessments should be a priority for future agricultural sustainability research, and the versatile methodological framework used for this regional assessment could readily be applied to such a multi-scale assessment with a few modifications.