Behavioral Model of Crop Soil Conservation (Case Study: Wheat Growers in Marvdasht Township)

Given the strategic importance of soil resources in the context of global changes, protecting them is a top priority for increasing food security and adopting environmental policies. Conservation activities to protect resources, such as soil, were initially attributed to "technical" and "technological" issues, however in recent decades the "social" and "individual" dimensions of these resources have been emphasized. It has been proven that humans with their behaviors towards the environment can destroy and threaten the environment. Therefore, this article examines the soil protection behavior of wheat growers and also presents a behavioral model that leads to their conservation actions toward the soil. The innovation of the present study is that despite many studies in the field of soil protection, one important issues in most of these studies have been ignored; in these studies human behavioral models have been neglected or they have been addressed incompletely and insufficiently. As a result, in this paper, considering this important aspects, the main goal is to extract a suitable pattern of protective behavior of farmers towards arable soils. Another distinguishing feature of this research is the use of phenomenology method which are less commonly has been used in these types of studies. Phenomenology is essentially the study of live experience or the world of life. It emphasizes the depth of experience and increases our understanding of life experiences. As a result, the findings of this type of research has directly related to one's lived experience and so it has fewer errors.

For this purpose, phenomenology research method was used. The data collection tool was an open-ended questionnaire and the method of completing this questionnaire was an in-depth interview. Using purposeful sampling and through snowball sampling technique, 28 wheat growers were selected, so that each of the farmers introduced the next research subject who was in a similar situation to them.

The results showed that the most important concepts perceived by studied farmers in effective factors of their environmental conservation behaviors were: lack of economic justification of soil conservation activity, contradiction, crop type, reduce the amount of crop harvested, lateral employment, cost reduction of livestock feed, fortune and destiny, facing legal issues, avoiding to burn plant residues, lowering crop yields, decrease in crop quality, loss of interest and motivation towards agriculture and the feeling of being deceived. On the other hand, the only protective behavior of farmers towards soil is avoiding to burn plant residues and most of the experienced behaviors by farmers are destructive and the most important destructive areas include not changing the way of tillage, dumping of plastic wastes, lack of water refinery, abandonment of agricultural inputs packages on the farmland, not doing the soil test, overuse of fertilizers and pesticides and lack of crop rotation.

The findings showed that studied farmers did not have good soil conservation experiences, their beliefs were incorrect and did not even have a proper definition of soil conservation, which caused them to not behave properly. Also, if they have weak forecasting of the future soil situation, they couldn’t or have no willingness to reveal their proper behavior.