Sustainable Livestock Decisions in a Post‐Conflict Frontier: Evidence From Colombia's Orinoquía

ABSTRACT The Orinoquía region is one of Colombia's principal agricultural frontiers and has been shaped by long‐standing armed‐conflict dynamics that continue to influence land governance, producer incentives, and investment decisions. Efforts to promote sustainable cattle production emphasize two key practices: sustainable pasture management (including rotational grazing systems) and ecologically appropriate stocking rates. However, their adoption varies widely because of institutional, economic, and biophysical constraints. This study applies a dual binary choice framework to examine the adoption decisions associated with these two practices and to assess whether they operate sequentially or independently. Results show that tenure security, measured through formal landownership, is strongly associated with the adoption of sustainable pasture management. In contrast, access to technical assistance is negatively associated with adoption, suggesting issues of program quality, targeting, or reverse causality. Older and more experienced producers are less likely to adopt, indicating path dependence. For stocking‐rate decisions, rotational and alternating grazing systems exhibit lower probabilities of meeting sustainable thresholds, likely reflecting implementation challenges in extensive systems. Larger finishing areas also tend to be managed less sustainably, and descriptive evidence suggests that unsustainable stocking in our sample is more frequently associated with understocking than overstocking, with 239 producers (70%) below 1 animal per hectare. These findings illustrate how structural and institutional conditions, including those linked to conflict legacies, shape sustainability transitions in the Orinoquía and can inform more tailored policy interventions for frontier livestock regions.