Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: holistic management (Page 1 of 7)

New paper: from sustainable grazing learner to leader

January 2, 2025 /

On New Year’s Eve, a new paper came out online first and OA in Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems led by former postdoc Brooke McWherter, called From learner to leader: exploring learning, motivations, and roles of regenerative grazing mentors. This paper emerged from her collaboration with Farmers for Climate Solutions and the Canadian Forage and Grassland Association, funded by FCS and Mitacs, that followed and assessed the national  Farm Resilience Mentorship Program (FaRM) for adaptive grazing. This paper is based on interviews with half of the program’s mentors that explored their own learning journeys, and how and why they became mentors to others. I a meta move, Brooke also mentored MREM alum and RA Hunar Arora, who is a co-author on this piece.

Two people labelled social supports and mentor pull a learner up a stylized hill showing various stages of learning.

Figure 2 in the new ASFS paper led by Brooke, showing the process of becoming a mentor.

New paper on systems thinking substance

July 20, 2024 /

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.

New research note on farmer ‘fenceline behaviour’

April 12, 2023 /

Table 1 in our Agriculture and Human Values research note, showing the statements used in our novel ‘fenceline behaviour’ question set.

At long last, a research note is out today in Agriculture and Human Values that had its genesis at many different farmer kitchen tables during past qualitative field work, going as far back as my Australian postdoc in 2008. I repeatedly heard things that suggested that direct neighbours had an impact on farm management and adoption behaviour, and not necessarily in the generally positive way suggested by diffusion of innovation theory.  In 2020 when I was hiring Kynetec to do a survey of beef producers in Canada, I turned those comments into a novel question set about ‘fenceline behaviour’, to see how those ideas looked at a population level and if there seemed to be any associations with adoption behaviour. In our new research note, Are fencelines sites of engagement or avoidance in farmer adoption of alternative practices? we identified two different clusters of farmers based on answers to those 8 statements–fenceline engagers and fenceline avoiders–and also found that farmers using adaptive multi-paddock grazing were three times more likely to be engagers. This suggests that feelings of vulnerability at the fenceline can discourage farmers who are avoiders from experimentation with new farm management approaches.  Some statements were more useful than others at differentiating between these two types. Most farmers agreed mildly, on average, that fencelines provide a good site for diagnosis: comparing the impacts of their practices relative to their neighbours. But there was a wide range of responses to, “It is ‘live and let live’ with my farming neighbours: they don’t comment on my practices and I don’t comment on theirs”, which is a rural expression of the ‘civil inattention’ concept first described by Erving Goffman in cities. We hope that others will build on this work, for instance to explore trust and norms in more detail with farm neighbours, micro-scale adoption communication and causality.

New paper on AMP grazing and wellbeing

August 2, 2022 /

Graphical abstract for new paper in ASFS

In the heady days of February 2020, before Covid landed in Halifax, I launched a panel-based survey of Canadian ranchers about adaptive/AMP grazing and well-being to wind up my SSHRC Insight Grant. The first paper out of that work is finally out in Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, Adaptive multi-paddock grazing and wellbeing: uptake, management practices and mindset among Canadian beef producers. One of the big surprises was the reported uptake, at 29% of the beef producer population, suggesting potential for a tipping point which may have something to do with the sudden increase in interest in regenerative approaches. Grazing regimes were distinct, as anticipated. The only type of well-being that was statistically associated with adaptive/AMP ranchers was higher physical well-being, but the other well-being scores also tell interesting stories. Insights from smaller-n studies that we tested here didn’t always hold up, for instance, neither being female, having a spouse who is a grazing partner nor belief in climate change were statistically related to grazing AMP.  Systems thinking and traditional thinking were both related just how you would expect, and it was nice to see the statements that Carolyn Mann developed for her Q-method work with ranchers turned into such useful scales for each of those.

March announcements

March 28, 2022 /

It is the usual frantic end-of-term time, compounded by COVID uncertainties and some family health issues, but I can’t let March go by without a post. There has been a lot happening worth exclaiming about.

First, ResNet postdoc Lara Cornejo started her fellowship remotely early this month, while she waits for her work permit to be approved. She is starting by working on modelling some of the pollination service delivery in dykelands and tidal wetlands based on fieldwork by Evan and Terrell from SMU.

Second, Brooke McWherter, currently a PhD candidate at Purdue University under the wonderful Dr. Zhao Ma, learned that she won a Mitacs Elevate postdoctoral fellowship to come work with me for two years. Her project will start in August, and will follow the new Advanced Grazing Management farmer peer-mentorship program being launched this year by Canadian Forage and Grassland Association and Farmers for Climate Solutions. Huge thanks to the latter for being the official host of this Mitacs. Brooke will unfortunately soon get to experience the work permit uncertainty that Lara is experiencing now.

Third, IDPhD applicant Robin Willcocks Musselman, already an MES alum, learned she won a Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship to supplement her study on my climax thinking SSHRC this fall. Robin will hopefully be looking longitudinally at experiences of flood displacement along the St. John River, as well as potentially elsewhere, to understand not only place disruption but processes of place adaptation and attachment.

Not bad for a single month. Welcome, Lara, and brava Brooke and Robin!

« Older posts

© 2025 Kate Sherren

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑