While I was in Australia, a first-authored piece from Brooke McWherter’s postdoc came out in Agriculture and Human Values. This new paper Exploring mental systems within regenerative agriculture: systems thinking and rotational grazing adoption among Canadian livestock producers, uses survey responses to explore not only the strength but also the substance of systems thinking. Our previous work showed that systems thinking capabilities are associated with adaptive or regenerative grazing practices–and in this work again a connection can be seen–but what is equally important is looking at what ‘things’ farmers see as included in their farm system. Brooke used exploratory factor analysis and identified four system focus types: livestock, economics, health and environment, and forage (see below). All but economics (which was p<0.05) were uncorrelated to our system thinking strength metric. Understanding both strength and types of system thinking will improve extension work on regenerative and associated grazing practices.
McWherter and Sherren (2024), Table 7: Exploratory factor analysis of farm components with loadings > 0.5 (N = 102)
A final thanks to Central Queensland University, which seems to have covered our OA costs for this paper, a lovely but puzzling discovery upon publication. Perhaps Springer picked up on our IP addresses during the time of press (in Cairns, for IASNR, or mine in Townsville, Mackay, and Rockhampton during my train trip to Brisbane afterward, all CQU campuses) and triggered this? I won’t quibble, but am appreciative.
