Barriers to improving infiltration and soil water retention

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Farmers at a ‘Catch the Rain’ workshop near Oamaru in 2023 brainstorming barriers to improving their infiltration rates and soil moisture retention.

‘Catch the Rain’ workshops in 2023 included an interesting exercise identifying possible and likely barriers to farmers improving rainfall infiltration and soil moisture retention - these are listed below.

One way for farmers to make use of this information could be to help identify how their individual context might affect their ability to make changes to improve these outcomes.

This information has been summarised from a more in-depth report which you can find on the ‘Catch the Rain’ web page.

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Farm system barriers

• Context fit - Do solutions integrate easily into your existing farm system?

• Infrastructure - Is your stock water, fencing and yarding infrastructure for new grazing approaches? 

• Profitability/cashflow - If you expect a new practice to negatively impact cash flow and/or profitability in the short term, do you have the capacity to absorb this?

• Big change challenges - If the most effective change/intervention you have identified is really significant (i.e. introducing agroforestry systems) it may introduce hurdles around acquiring new knowledge, managing uncertainty of outcomes, large financial investments etc.

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Mindset

• Attitude to change - Are you focused on continuous improvement? Do you see failures as learning opportunities? Do you have an appetite for (managed) risk? Do you prefer quick wins or play the long game?

• Awareness - Do you know if your rainfall infiltration rates and soil moisture retention are costing you? Can you see the opportunity/cost for production, profitability and environmental impact?

• Knowledge and understanding - Do you understand how healthy soils function? Can you diagnose the root cause of poor function? Do you have access to education, peers or advisors that can help?

• Confidence - Successfully improving outcomes can be hampered by conflicting information, lack of experience etc. Confidence in your plan, abilities and support network can help you push through these challenges.

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Social

• Community pressure - If your new practices break traditional norms, this can sometimes be met with criticism or cynicism by the local farming community. 

• Support network - Your wider farm team (bank managers, advisors, reps etc) can become supporters or critics of your new approaches. It’s important to ensure you have plenty of supporters to keep you going, even if you have to find new ones. 

• Trust - Trust can become an issue where ideas for new/different practices come from other people. Farmers need to ensure they trust the skills, knowledge and integrity of people suggesting or advocating for these new/different practices, which can be difficult if personal relationships do not exist.

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Outside influences

• Financial constraints - Debt pressure, cash flow and the influence of banks and/or shareholders may limit options where investment is required to improve outcomes, especially where these are uncertain or long term.

• Policy and regulations - Compliance tasks and future policy uncertainty can distract farmers' focus and increase the risk that future policy/rule changes don’t recognise the benefits of planned practice changes (especially if modeled rather than measured). 

• Knowledge gap - Science and industry knowledge about rainfall infiltration rates, soil moisture retention and the cost/opportunity of these is limited. This may limit farmer interest (perceived as not a big issue) and reduce confidence in possible solutions as they have not been rigorously tested. 

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