6. Concluding remarks
The effect of agricultural activities on water quality
very much depends upon the behavior of farm operators.
Although behavior is influenced by a highly
complex set of factors which are by no means well understood
or consistent for different situations, behavior
is partly shaped by attitudes toward the environment,
which in turn are influenced by knowledge and
information. This paper focused upon this initial part
of the chain—the influence of the sources of information
about agricultural practices on environmental
attitudes held by farm operators.
Farmers express on average a middle-of-the-road
level of concern toward most water quality related
issues as well as pesticide specific issues. However,
within those issues, those related to farming are generally
considered more serious than those more that are
more distant from farm operations (with the exception
of water pollution from factories, which is considered
the most serious). Farmers’ beliefs are similar to those
of the general public on average, but are distributed
more uniformly, suggesting that the farm community
may be more polarized on environmental issues than
the general public.
Information preferences do emerge. Farmers regard
first-hand sources of information such as direct field
observation and pesticide labels as being the most important.
Common institutional sources, i.e., cooperative
extension services and dealers are a strong and
close second choice. Overall, the greater the degree
to which information is processed before reaching the
farmer, that is, the more ‘second-hand’ the information
is, the less importance farmers tend to attach to it.
The relationship between information sources and
attitudes varied. Farmers placing greater importance
on information from news media expressed greater
concern about all forms of environmental quality problems
associated with agricultural chemicals. Farmers
placing greater importance on information from cooperative
extension services expressed greater concern
about mixing and loading pesticides, residues on food,
and drinking water quality. Interestingly, information
from pesticide dealers had mixed effects on environmental
attitudes: farmers placing greater importance
on information from this source expressed less concern
about general environmental quality but greater concern
about drinking water quality and harm to wildlife.