Executive Summary

Conservation practices are crucial for sustainable agricultural production and the preservation of healthy ecosystems. These practices significantly enhance soil health, water quality, and biodiversity, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Edge-of-field (EOF) practices, such as saturated buffers, bioreactors, and water quality enhancement wetlands, play a pivotal role in improving water quality by effectively reducing nutrient loads and fostering wildlife habitats.

However, these key EOF practices have been remarkably underutilized even though they can effectively reduce nutrient delivery (Iowa Learning Farms, 2022). The 2022 Iowa Farmland Ownership and Tenure Survey shows that EOF practices are used on less than 1 percent of Iowa farmland, compared to 7 percent for cover crops and 27 percent for no-till (Tong & Zhang, 2023). This low adoption rate is often due to a lack of understanding of these innovative practices among farmers and landowners, and a statewide history of draining wetlands for agriculture. Because these structural EOF practices are based on recent scientific advancements, farmers and landowners are largely unfamiliar with them, and lack clear comprehension of what they do and why they would be necessary—leading to uncertainty and reluctance to implement them. In addition, some of the practices are familiar practices, such as a wetland or a buffer, that have been engineered for better water quality treatment and many farmers and landowners don’t know the difference between the standard practice and the water quality improvement practice.

In an earlier Iowa Nutrient Research Center project (Wan, Comito & Zhang, 2024), we investigated the effects of various modes of messaging about these critical EOF practices on encouraging farmers to adopt them. The purpose of this study is to further decode the reasons for low practice adoption and refine our investigation of how educational messages might most effectively address them.

In collaboration with the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology at Iowa State University and with grant support from the Iowa Nutrient Research Center, we conducted an online survey among Iowa farmers and landowners across five different HUC-8 watersheds in the Des Moines Lobe, beginning in July 2024. We received a total of 774 completed surveys, for a response rate of 10.6 percent. While this figure seems low, it aligns with our initial expectations and typical response rates for online-only surveys. Anticipating this low response rate, we proactively expanded our sample size to ensure sufficient data for robust analysis. We implemented a split-sample design where farmers and landowners are randomly assigned to an information treatment describing the benefits of EOF practices; these were incorporated into the online survey, ensuring that respondents viewed the information assigned to them.