RESUMEN
Robotic weed control is not yet widely adopted, despite its technological availability and proven economics and sustainability in crop cultivation by replacing seasonal labor and synthetic pesticides. This impedes technologically enabled changes toward more sustainable agricultural systems. Given that adopting robotics for the weeding process requires changing existing systems, farmers' appraisals for the new and the current weeding technology may constitute barriers. However, this dualism has been largely ignored by previous studies. Based on a duality approach, we investigate farmers' beliefs, and adaptive and maladaptive appraisals of current and new robotic weeding in sugar beets. The main variable of interest is their behavioral intention to adopt weeding robots. For our sample of German farmers, we identify the main enablers perceived efficacy of the robots and social norms. The main barrier are maladaptive rewards from traditional weeding. We recommend policy incentives to promote large-scale uptake of new and more sustainable robotic technologies. To improve efficacy perceptions of such robotic systems public demonstrations/talks are mostly relevant. Maladaptive rewards can be reduced, for instance, by notifying about the dependency of the current practices on future availability of synthetic inputs or seasonal workers.
RESUMEN
The Data presented in this article contains information on farmers' acceptance of results-based agri-environmental schemes (AES) collected from German farmers in an online survey in spring 2020. Acceptance is measured in the willingness to participate and the intensity of participation in terms of area willing to enroll for the scheme. Personal, farm characteristics and behavioral factors have been considered. We used a between subject design to introduce a social nudge (i.e. information treatment) for one group of participants. The data was collected via the software LimeSurvey. We chose a two-step approach e.g. participants were asked for participation first and then only those who would be willing to participate were asked for the intensity in terms of area willing to enroll. This data is related to the paper Farmers' acceptance of results-based agri-environmental schemes: a German perspective[1].