Why Farmers Keep—or Abandon—Soil Health Practices: It’s About People, Not Just Soil

When a farmer decides to plant a cover crop after harvest or leave the plow in the shed, the decision rarely stays on the farm. It ripples through coffee-shop conversations, lease negotiations with absentee landowners, and quiet judgments from neighbors watching December drill work cross a frozen field. New research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, The Ohio State University, and the University of Tennessee, published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, argues that this social web—not just agronomy or economics—determines whether soil health practices survive beyond their first season. The study, led by Fernanda Souza Krupek, interviewed farmers who spent five years running replicated on-farm experiments through a unique partnership between Nebraska Extension, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, and growers across the state.

The stakes are considerable. Despite years of federal investment—programs such as the Conservation Reserve Program, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and the Conservation Stewardship Program together represent roughly $6.7 billion in public spending—key practices like cover crops, no-till, prescribed grazing, and improved nitrogen management still cover less than 14 percent of current US land capacity. More troubling, practices that were once adopted are being abandoned. Recent analyses of farm-level panel data show that intermittent use and disadoption of cover crops and reduced tillage may be far more common than previously recognized. Because many soil health benefits, from improved aggregation and infiltration to gains in organic carbon and microbial communities, require sustained management over multiple years, this churn undermines the very outcomes the programs were designed to deliver.

The research team approached the problem through the lens of diffusion of innovation theory, which explains how new ideas spread through social systems, and social learning theory, which describes how people learn by observing and imitating peers. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, they conducted in-depth interviews lasting up to two hours with eight farmers who had actively participated in the Nebraska Soil Health Initiative, a five-year demonstration project launched in 2016. Seventeen farmers initially enrolled, managing a combined 1,793 acres, with randomized, replicated side-by-side comparisons of soil health practices against their conventional systems. The interviews probed where farmers got their soil health knowledge, how information moved through their networks, and how their experiences with experimentation shaped long-term management decisions.

Four interrelated dimensions emerged from the analysis. The first was peer influence and social interaction, which farmers experienced through three distinct channels: land tenure arrangements, perceived acceptance within their communities, and farming traditions. The second was co-learning, the collaborative construction of soil health knowledge through one-on-one exchanges with trusted peers. The third was the expansion of farmer networks through on-farm experimentation, field days, and demonstration activities. The fourth was the set of experiential tradeoffs farmers weighed as they tested practices on their own ground and adjusted management over time.

Land tenure proved to be one of the most consequential social factors. Roughly 39 percent of US agricultural land is farmed under operator agreements, and farmers in the study described how short-term cash-rent arrangements, particularly with absentee landowners focused on rental income, discouraged long-term conservation investments. One participant explained that under a one-year lease he would not plant field-edge pollinator habitat, because a different renter the following year would likely tear it out. Another described how high cash rents forced tenants to prioritize yield on every acre, leaving nothing for soil-building investments. Yet the interviews also revealed landowners acting as conservation advocates, with one family stipulating cover crops as a condition of their lease agreement. Farmers noted that degraded or marginal fields offered a lower-risk entry point for experimentation, where visible improvements in productivity could persuade skeptical landowners that soil health practices pay off over time.

The social cost of deviating from local norms, which the researchers call perceived acceptance or the cost of perception, emerged as a second barrier. Farmers described being seen as different, weird, or bad when they adopted practices outside the dominant corn-soybean template. One participant recalled a neighbor asking what he was doing in the field with a drill in December, when the short winter window for cover crop establishment in Nebraska makes the practice look eccentric. Another noted that untilled fields simply do not look as good in spring, giving conventional neighbors an early-season visual advantage. Interestingly, farmers with integrated crop-livestock operations reported less peer pressure, because livestock gave them alternative work that made the race to plant and harvest first feel less urgent. Farming traditions added another layer, with participants describing both the pull of grandfather’s rotations and legumes from the 1950s and the deliberate rejection of the plow-and-disk systems their fathers used.

Against these social frictions, the study documented powerful facilitators. Co-learning, particularly one-on-one exchanges with farmers who had already worked through the learning curve, built confidence and practical know-how. Early adopters functioned as credible sources of information, fielding calls about cover crop mixes, termination timing, and herbicide strategies. Participants emphasized that soil health improvement needs to be a community-based effort, and several called for small local peer learning groups distributed across Nebraska’s diverse Great Plains environments. On-farm experimentation itself expanded networks: farmers met people they would never otherwise have encountered, hosted field days that drew late adopters and young farmers curious about trying cover crops, and found that real-time information sharing at these events reinforced their own commitment to sustained practice use.

The experiential dimension was equally important. Farmers unanimously stated their intention to continue practices after their conservation program contracts expired, with one noting he would keep splitting nitrogen and planting cover crops regardless of whether he remained in the Conservation Stewardship Program. But they were clear-eyed about tradeoffs. Reduced tillage improved infiltration and reduced erosion but created challenges with soil trafficability and weed resistance. Cover crops offered nutrient cycling and erosion control but raised concerns about yield reduction, pest pressure, input costs, and the narrow window to fit them into a corn-soybean rotation. Diversified rotations and crop-livestock integration promised resilience and income diversification but demanded machinery, labor, and access to markets that often did not exist nearby. Farmers described iterating on these practices year after year, adjusting timing and species based on weather, observed outcomes, and advice from their networks.

The researchers emphasize that adoption is not a one-time decision but a dynamic, evolving process embedded in social relationships and institutional arrangements. They argue that policymakers and extension professionals should prioritize social components when designing on-farm research: supporting landowner-tenant conversations about soil health, fostering peer groups and roundtable discussions rather than one-way information delivery, and integrating opinion leaders with beginning and non-adopter farmers. With the average age of US farmers now 57.5 years and rising, the study suggests that young and beginning farmers, who tend to have broader connections, could serve as key vectors for spreading soil health information. The findings also point toward rethinking traditional extension models that privilege scientific expertise over local, experiential knowledge.

For a field that has long measured success in acres treated and tons of soil saved, this research makes a compelling case that the human dimension deserves equal billing. Soil health, it turns out, is cultivated as much through conversation, trust, and community as through cover crop seed and reduced tillage. The farmers in this study kept experimenting not because a program paid them to, but because their networks gave them the confidence, the evidence, and the social permission to keep going. Understanding and strengthening those networks, the authors conclude, may be the most underutilized tool in the effort to make soil health management stick.

Subject of Research: How farmers' social networks and interactions sustain soil health management in the US Midwest

Article Title: Exploring the influence of farmers’ networks and social interactions to sustain soil health management

Article References: Exploring the influence of farmers’ networks and social interactions to sustain soil health management. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2026.1823295

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsufs.2026.1823295

Keywords: soil health, farmer networks, social learning, on-farm experimentation, conservation adoption, land tenure, cover crops, no-till, Nebraska, diffusion of innovation, sustainable agriculture, peer learning