Organic farmers’ motivations and challenges for adopting conservation agriculture in Europe

Conservation agriculture and organic farming are considered as promising sustainable agricultural sys- tem for producing food, while minimizing environmental impacts. Despite an increasing number of experimental data on organic conservation practices and various stud- ies dealing with the adoption of conservation agriculture by farmers, none of those studies have specifically ad- dressed conservation agriculture adoption under organic conditions in Europe. We carried out a survey with 159 farmers located in 10 European countries. These farmers had applied at least two of the following conservation practices: (i) no-tillage, (ii) reduced tillage and (iii) green manures. Each farmer assessed socio-economic, agro- nomic and environmental motivations and problems for each conservation practice, using a Likert scale. For each conservation practice, we ranked motivations and prob- lems and carried out a principal component analysis, followed by clustering to identify groups of farmers. Independent of the conservation practices, the most im- portant motivations were related to soil fertilitypreservation and challenges were mainly linked to crop management, machinery and yield performances. For all conservation practices, we identify three groups of farmers that shared the same type of motivations and challenges across Europe: “soil conservationists,” “agro-technically challenged farmers,” and “indifferent farmers.” Soil conservationist farmers were strongly mo- tivated by soil preservation and minimizing environmen- tal impacts. Agro-technically challenged farmers mainly expressed agronomic problems and challenges. There were no clear effects of location or farm characteristics explaining these attitudes, but they depended on farmers’ environmental concerns and beliefs. The study demon- strated that research priorities should address agronomic problems caused by the adoption of conservation prac- tices in organic farming, weed control in particular.