Fig 1.
Locations of the seven (F1-F7) farmers and three additional farmers (A8-A10) interviewed in 2021.
Map adapted from CBS Gebiedsindelingen 2024 WFS, via www.pdok.nl.
Fig 2.
Diagram illustrating the flow of information and the results of each step of the approach used in this study.
The final outputs which address the two research objectives are indicated in bold parallelograms. Boxes underneath the parallelograms indicate the figures and tables in Results and Supporting Information.
Table 1.
Context and cropping systems characteristics of the ten farmers interviewed in 2021 on their experiences with first-year strip cropping.
Table 2.
Decision rules summarizing farmers’ decisions related to crop neighbor conditions during the harvesting phase.
Responses indicate the number of farmers that mentioned each strip cropping decision rule. The column describing the code in the decision tree shows how the rules are represented in the decision tree (see S7 Fig).
Fig 3.
Illustration of part of the decision tree built to visualize the synthesized farmers’ decision rules based on the part of the list of the decision rules presented in Table 2.
Columns in the diagram represent the four dimensions of diversity: time, genes, space, and operational crop management. The rotated text on the left side of the tree shows one of the four synthetic topics for one of the eight management phases. Here results are shown for the topic Crop neighbor and management phase Harvesting. Farmers’ decision rules and farmer codes are presented in green and orange boxes. Blue boxes represent decision rules proposed by agronomists. Dotted arrows represent feedback loops.
Table 3.
Loading of the ten farmers onto the two archetypes.
Shading and shade color (reflecting MFA cluster colors) represent full archetype membership (loadings ≥ 0.67).
Fig 4.
First two principal components of the factor map of the hierarchical clustering of farmers (F1-7 and A8-10) based on the MFA.
The farmer codes are presented in Table 1. The formation of the two hierarchical clusters in a dendrogram is presented at the top right corner of the factor map.
Table 4.
Explanation of condition nodes and decision nodes in the SCM, ordered by decreasing centrality.
Fig 5.
Social Cognitive Map (SCM) of the ten interviewed farmers with nine condition nodes (yellow) and nine decision nodes (blue).
Table 4 provides the explanation of the nodes. Node size corresponds to the centrality (i.e., sum of edges leaving a condition node or entering a decision node) and was scaled into five sizes for visualization purpose: the smallest circles represent a centrality of 1-5, followed by centrality values ranging between 6-10, 11-20, 21-30, and the largest circle with centrality greater than 30. Edge line thickness corresponds to the number of times the edge was encountered in the data.