ABSTRACT
Rotational grazing (RG) has attracted much attention as a cornerstone of multifunctional agriculture (MFA) in animal systems, potentially capable of producing a range of goods and services of value to diverse stakeholders in agricultural landscapes and rural communities, as well as broader societal benefits. Despite these benefits, global adoption of MFA has been uneven, with some places seeing active participation, while others have seen limited growth. Recent conceptual models of MFA emphasize the potential for bottom-up processes and linkages among social and environmental systems to promote multifunctionality. Social networks are critical to these explanations but how and why these networks matter is unclear. We investigated fifty-three farms in three states in the United States (New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania) and developed a stylized model of social networks and systemic change in the dairy farming system. We found that social networks are important to RG adoption but their impact is contingent on social and spatial factors. Effects of networks on farmer decision making differ according to whether they comprise weak-tie relationships, which bridge across disparate people and organizations, or strong-tie relationships, which are shared by groups in which members are well known to one another. RG adoption is also dependent on features of the social landscape including the number of dairy households, the probability of neighboring farmers sharing strong ties, and the role of space in how networks are formed. The model replicates features of real-world adoption of RG practices in the Eastern US and illustrates pathways toward greater multifunctionality in the dairy landscape. Such models are likely to be of heuristic value in network-focused strategies for agricultural development.
ABSTRACT
The concept of multifunctionality describes and promotes the multiple non-production benefits that emerge from agricultural systems. The notion of multifunctional agriculture was conceived in a European context and largely has been used in European policy arenas to promote and protect the non-production goods emerging from European agriculture. Thus scholars and policy-makers disagree about the relevance of multifunctionality for United States agricultural policy and US farmers. In this study, we explore lived expressions of multifunctional agriculture at the farm-level to examine the salience of the multifunctionality concept in the US. In particular, we investigate rotational grazing and confinement dairy farms in the eastern United States as case studies of multifunctional and productivist agriculture. We also analyze farmer motivations for transitioning from confinement dairy to rotational grazing systems. Through interviews with a range of dairy producers in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New York, we found that farmers were motivated by multiple factors--including improved cow health and profitability--to transition to rotational grazing systems to achieve greater farm-level multifunctionality. Additionally, rotational grazing farmers attributed a broader range of production and non-production benefits to their farm practice than confinement dairy farmers. Further, rotational grazing dairy farmers described a system-level notion of multifunctionality based on the interdependence of multiple benefits across scales--from the farm to the national level--emerging from grazing operations. We find that the concept of multifunctionality could be expanded in the US to address the interdependence of benefits emerging from farming practices, as well as private benefits to farmers. We contend that understanding agricultural benefits as experienced by the farmer is an important contribution to enriching the multifunctionality concept in the US context, informing agri-environmental policy and programs, and ultimately expanding multifunctional agricultural practice in the US.
