Factors influencing farmer adoption of soil health practices in the United States: a narrative review

Soil health practices—such as cover cropping, crop rotation, and conservation tillage—provide synergistic environmental and economic benefits, both on and beyond the farms that utilize them. Given these benefits, researchers are puzzled by the persistent adoption gap for these practices. This narrative review synthesizes the insights of the soil health practices adoption literature, with a focus on U.S. commodity agriculture. While farms, farmers, and farm communities are too heterogeneous to represent with a single model, this review finds five emergent themes: 1) differences in perspective along the adoption continuum; 2) interaction among soil health practices; 3) qualitatively different pathways to incremental and transformative change; 4) noneconomic farmer motives; and 5) the key role of larger farm and food system context. This study finds rational actor models inadequate to explain farmer decision making, suggesting that researchers would do well to utilize interpretive frames that elucidate interactions among groups of people and take account of multiple forms of capital. Reviewing recommendations for increasing the adoption of soil health practices, this study finds that a complementary approach—combining education, research, policy, measures to overcome equipment barriers, and efforts to address farm and food system context—holds the most promise.