Are farmers empowered? The role of empowerment in farmer decision making about weed and invertebrate management

Abstract

This research investigates how empowerment affects Australia's broadacre farmers' decision making about weed and invertebrate management in the context of two strategies, Integrated Weed Management (IWM) and Integrated Pest Management (IPM). The research is informed by constructivist grounded theory and used in-depth interview, observation and document analysis to extract rich data. With the rise of chemical resistance, the agricultural industry has placed considerable emphasis on the need to accelerate and achieve farmer adoption of IWM and IPM, but our evidence suggests that greater emphasis should be given to understanding the socio-cultural factors that affect farmer decision making. Farmer empowerment emerged as a core concept from the data. We found farmers are typically empowered, which affected how they learnt, constructed knowledge and made decisions about weeds and invertebrates. This is important for extension to consider as it affects the dialogue between farmers and extension.