3.2 Personal characteristics
These included the number of years respondents had been aware of another grower in their district using no-till; the presence or absence of a farm management decision maker with a tertiary education; the employment of a directly paid consultant or advisor and the average number of days per year spent attending cropping extension events such as field days, seminars or workshops. Membership of a no-till farmer organisation was recorded (24 per cent were members), but could not be used in the regression analysis due to autocorrelation that was largely the result of almost all no-till organisation members (92 per cent) being adopters. Essentially there is a causality issue with this variable: is membership a suitable measure of influence on adoption, or is it a consequence of adoption? As no-till adoption is hypothesised to be information-intensive, information and learning-related variables including the presence of a tertiary educated contributor to management decisions in the farming business and attendance of cropping extension events were predicted to have positive influences on the probability of no-till adoption (see Rahm and Huffman 1984; Westra and Olson 1997; Wang et al. 2000; Cary et al. 2001; Caswell et al. 2001). Acquisition of conservation tillage equipment or re-configuration of existing equipment to fit a no-till system is likely to incur substantial up-front costs. If the benefits are mainly expected to be realised in the longer-term, those with stronger preferences for short-terms profits (i.e. a high discount rate) may be less likely to adopt the innovation. Respondents’ discount rates were derived using a simple question relating to their valuation of money over time, that is, ‘If you were offered $10 000 today, or a greater amount in 5 years, how much would the amount in 5 years have to be for you to wait to get the money and forego the $10 000 today?’.