Engagement With Biodiversity: Are Farmers Different From the Wider Community?

The damaging effects agriculture has on the environment have resulted, increasingly, in conflict between the urban community and farmers. The extent to which this conflict might be resolved depends, in part, on whether farmers and the wider community differ in their degree of concern for the environment. We measured the engagement of farmers and the wider community with biodiversity in New Zealand. We also investigated differences among farmers and the wider community in the antecedents of engagement, such as their involvement and goal intentions with respect to conserving biodiversity. We found that farmers and the wider community were similar in their involvement, cognitive engagement, and affective engagement with conserving biodiversity. Both had similar attitudes towards, and goal intentions regarding, conserving biodiversity, but they differed in their behavioral engagement, their behavior towards biodiversity. We found that farmers were more (not less) behaviorally engaged than the wider community. We concluded that the difference between farmers and the wider community in their behavioral engagement with protecting biodiversity was the product of differences in opportunities and opportunity costs related to such behavior. This has implications for the wider community's perception of farmers' motivations and its judgments about what constitutes “good” farming practice from an environmental perspective.