Environmental Concerns and Stewardship Behaviors Among Rural Landowners: What Supports Farmers and Non-farmers in Being Good Stewards?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intensive agriculture is a main factor of biodiversity and ecosystem services loss globally. It is therefore of great importance to understand how rural landowners are managing their lands and how environmental stewardship behaviors could be strengthened. Farming and non-farming rural landowners are often considered a homogenous group. In reality, however, they vary by their histories, attitudes, interests, and resources. While many rural landowners manage their lands with environmental values in mind, others may struggle to do so. Ignoring this diversity poses the risk that planning and policy for sustainable agriculture are less effective than they could be. Hence, it is of interest to understand the variety of environmental perceptions and stewardship behaviors across these varied groups. To help addressing this knowledge gap, we conducted a survey of 1,200 farming and non-farming rural landowners, using Ontario as a case study. We specifically investigated whether farming landowners differed from non-farming landowners in expressed environmental concerns and stewardship behaviors, as well as what the roles are of participation in conservation incentive programs, demographic factors, and landholding characteristics. We analyzed survey answers with logistic regression and text analysis. Our results suggest that farming landowners are generally less environmentally concerned than non-farming landowners. However, it appears that this difference may be less driven by farm ownership than by contextual factors, such as landowner age and participation in conservation programs. Participation in conservation programs was more pronounced for non-farming landowners and was associated with higher likelihood of environmental concerns and engaging with stewardship behaviors. In contrast, higher age emerged as predictor of lower environmental concerns. In addition, we found that cost factors and knowledge needs were important barriers for stewardship behaviors across farming and non-farming rural landowners. Based on our results, we are making recommendations for increasing the effectiveness of agricultural sustainability planning and policy in Ontario, focusing on reducing financial and knowledge barriers to pro-environmental land management behaviors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".