The contribution of diverse motivations for adhering to soil conservation initiatives and the role of conservation agriculture features in decision-making

Under the fifth strategic development plan of Iran, the government is necessitated to trigger the agro-ecological initiatives like conservation agriculture (CA) by stimulating farmers to become involved in the schemes as efficiently as possible, along the lines of global policies to enhance environmentally-friendly development. This study, as being the case, calls for the knowledge gap of motivation-intention-behavior, investigating the association of diverse motivations of 382 farmers in Tabriz, East Azerbaijan, with the soil conservation behavior (SCB), also inclusive of the contribution of CA features, including relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, observability, and testability, as the farmers were stratified to low and high SCB. The theoretical framework consists of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and motivational model (MM), the former is commonly used and the latter has the potential to be given much attention, conceptualized by well-being, identity, hedonistic, and idealistic concepts. The study provides evidence that 70.42% of farmers adhere to and carry out SCB at a low rate; whereas, 29.58% of the rest has a high adoption rate. The results also illustrate that attitude towards CA contributes to influencing SCB, as well as the significant and positive impact of PBC on behavioral intention and SCB. While well-being motivation has a negative impact on attitude towards CA, behavioral intention, and SCB, identity and hedonistic motivations have a significant and positive impact on attitude and SCB that are mediated by behavioral intention. The paper concludes that (1) the agricultural extension needs to change farmers' attitudes by making farmers aware of the relative advantage, compatibility, and testability of CA, (2) farmers should receive technical, financial, and educational support to increase their volitional control on CA, (3) it is strongly suggested addressing the primary obstacles to SCB, which are facilitated by delivering the subsidized agricultural inputs (e.g., fertilizer, fuel, and livelihoods) to farmers with well-being motivations, (4) the agricultural extension is also recommended recognizing farmers with identity and hedonistic incentives, they are as a reference group and are imitated by non-adopter or slowly adopter farmers.