Farmers' adoption of conservation agriculture: A review and synthesis of recent research

Abstract

The paper reviews and synthesizes past research in order to identify those independent variables that explain conservation agriculture adoption. The authors find few if any influences on the adoption of conservation agriculture after analyzing factors such as farm size, education, land tenure, output prices, and soil erosion rate among many variables. The only possible universal factor may be social capital based on positive findings of some research and expected cost-effectiveness relative to other policy approaches.