Conference Agenda

Conservation practices are central to sustainable agriculture, yet adoption remains limited because farmers face pervasive transition costs and uncertainties that often require policy support to overcome. Beyond standard socioeconomic constraints, behavioral traits may be pivotal in shaping adoption decisions especially when conservation practices generate uncertain short-run yield effects but delayed benefits through improved yield stability. However, evidence is scarce on how loss aversion, risk preferences, and time preferences jointly relate to conservation practice adoption and its yield dynamics. We develop a behavioral adoption framework that links these traits to the mean-variance tradeoffs farmers face when switching from conventional to conservation systems, and we test its implications using detailed survey measures of farmer preferences combined with plot-level production data from China’s major maize regions. The results show that behavioral traits on the demand side are systematically associated with adoption, and their importance depends on heterogeneous agronomic conditions and socioeconomic characteristics. Risk and time preferences are the most consequential dimensions, while loss aversion matters primarily through the short-run yield losses. These findings imply that public interventions mitigating behavioral barriers related to risk and intertemporal tradeoffs should be tailored to local yield dynamics and farmer heterogeneity.