Farmers' Attitudes Towards Climate Change and Implications for Communication

Useful to Usable (U2U): Transforming Climate Variability and Change Information for Cereal Crop Producers is a USDA-NIFA funded research and extension project focused on improving the uptake of climate information for agricultural production in the Midwestern United States. Over the course of this project we conducted several large-scale surveys of farmers and farm advisors across the Midwest to better understand their concerns about climate impacts, their use of climate information in decision making, and their beliefs about climate change. From these surveys we discovered that climate change beliefs beliefs significantly influenced perceived climate risks, willingness to use climate info, adaptation and mitigation beliefs and trust in various information sources. This presentation will focus on these key findings regarding climate change beliefs and discuss how these results can help improve communication with the agricultural community about climate-related issues.