Sarah Carlson doesn’t mince words when asked about the need to protect water in the face of climate change.

“This is an urgent challenge,” she says. “We can’t spend 50 years messing around to see what really drives change.”

As senior programs and member engagement director with Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), Sarah is playing a key role in creating solutions to our water and climate crisis by working to persuade agricultural producers in her state to farm more sustainably.

With more than 23 million acres of corn and soybeans sown each year, Iowa’s farmers can make a big impact by adopting practices such as cover cropping to improve water and soil health.

Cover crops, planted as ground cover between harvest cycles, are an effective conservation tool. They improve the ability of farmland to hold water and reduce the amount of nutrient pollution that washes into river systems. Their dense root systems reduce soil erosion and lower the risk of catastrophic flooding caused by severe weather events related to climate change.

Thanks to the work of organizations like PFI, which offers farmers a cost-share program to offset the expenses incurred by adopting the practice, there’s been a 15% increase in cover crop acres above what would have been sowed in the U.S. Midwest without those incentives.

Sarah and the PFI team work at the grassroots level to make change happen.

Over the past decade, PFI has cultivated an active network of farmers to spread the word about the benefits of cover crops. They hold farmer field days across the state and run a farmer referral program designed to increase enrollment in PFI’s cost-share program.

But changing farm practices – and farmer behaviors – takes time. Even with gains made over the past decade, cover crops are used on just over 7% of farmland in the Midwest.

To learn more about why farmers may be hesitant to utilize cover crops – and how to persuade more of them to embrace the practice – PFI has recently turned to behavioral science.

The organization partnered with ideas42, a nonprofit that applies insights from behavioral science – the study of how people make decisions and act in the real world – to create a more equitable world. PFI’s goal was to identify and mitigate behavioral barriers to participation in cover crop programs, with the idea of refining their programs to sign up more farmers.

First, ideas42 reviewed existing research, PFI’s program materials and data, and conducted two dozen in-depth interviews with farmers, landowners, PFI staff and cover crop businesses.

This “behavioral diagnosis” process helped shed light on the barriers to cover cropping and enrolling in PFI’s cost-share program.

“The diagnosis is something that we do very intensively,” says Cecilia Shang, senior behavioral designer with ideas42. “We try our best not to make any assumptions about the context or about what people believe or how their behaviors might be linked to their beliefs.”

The Walton Family Foundation supported ideas42’s work with PFI as part of our efforts advance learning that leads to strategic adaptation, in service of continuous improvement in the foundation’s social and environmental impact.

Through their research, ideas42 uncovered eight behavioral insights into why some farmers don’t plant cover crops. Among them:

Cover crops involve high up-front costs but long-term benefits. Adopting cover crops requires financial investments for every crop cycle, but it may take several years to see benefits from reduced costs for fertilizer or herbicides. Other benefits, like increased soil resiliency, are hard to track and may accrue over time in savings rather than additional dollars. “There are a lot of upfront costs but then the return on the investment doesn't happen in the financial cycle that farmers typically use to calculate their annual finances,” says Cecilia.

Farmers hold misconceptions about whether they were eligible for cover crop cost-sharing programs. Some farmers expressed confusion about whether they could apply for both government and private cost-share programs.

Farmers’ tolerance for risk decreases during good years and increases during hard times. During times of higher yields, farmers said they were less likely to risk those gains by trying new practices. Conversely, during bad times, they were more likely to try new practices because they had little to lose. “We’ve had quite a few years of good times in agriculture,” one farmer told ideas42. “If things are going good, most people do not want to change, so [they are] not going to seek ways to change. When things are bad, they look for anything — grasping at straws to make things better.”

Farmers are more open to trying new practices when they have a personal connection with the messenger. “We heard a lot about the importance of learning about cover crops from trusted sources, like neighbors or farm co-op employees with whom they have strong personal relationships. They are the ones farmers are going to rely on for information, and listen to, when it comes to considering practices like this,” says Jessica Li, senior behavioral designer with ideas42, who worked with Cecilia on the PFI project. “Those trusted individuals in a farmer's network are incredibly important.”

Armed with those behavioral insights, the team at ideas42 mapped out a series of recommended actions for PFI. They ranged from changing methods and timing of communication to reach farmers at times when they are most likely to take action on cover crops, to reframing messaging to emphasize the losses incurred by farming without cover crops, like soil runoff from flooding, that can be reduced with cover crops.

Some of the behavioral findings challenged PFI’s assumptions, such as the revelation that many farmers are more risk averse when times are good.

“I would've thought that farmers who had more money would have more ability to spend, but it's actually people who are in desperate situations that want to take the risk more,” Sarah says.

The insights provided valuable information that PFI can now use to adjust strategies for how best to engage farmers and persuade them to try cover cropping, she says. For example, the analysis of PFI’s data found that farmers who signed up earlier in the summer were likely to plant more cover crop acres.

“There was a direct correlation to earlier sign-ups and more planted acres. And so then we pushed on getting earlier sign-ups,” Sarah says.

“We constantly are taking farmer feedback to shape our work, which is why I think we're good at understanding behavior. The work that ideas42 does can help us deepen our understanding even more.”

As a nonprofit with limited staff and resources, Sarah says, PFI needs to be “as efficient as possible” to reach the greatest number of farmers and increase acres planted to cover crops.

“We don't have as much money and staff as we really need to reach the goals that we want. So that's why we need those insights into what farmers are thinking,” Sarah says. “Even if they lead to a minor tweak in how we do our work, if it results in 100,000 more acres planted to cover crops, that is money well spent.”