Factors Influencing Farmers’ Support for the Minnesota Buffer Law: A Cross-County Case Study of Rice and Dakota Counties

Vegetative buffers are a Best Management Practice that have been well studied as a regulatory tool for agricultural non-point source pollution control. In 2015, the Minnesota State Legislature passed the Minnesota Buffer Law mandating buffer establishment on all public waterways and ditches. This study investigates farmers’ support for the Minnesota Buffer Law in Rice and Dakota Counties. Our study examines farmers’ support for environmental practices through legally mandated regulation, an area of study that scholars have note addressed in the literature on Best Management Practice adoption. We collected data from interviews with farmers and various stakeholders to address the question: do local situational variable and farmers’ personal attitudes influence support for the Minnesota Buffer Law in Rice and Dakota Counties? We found that the interplay between farmers’ personal values and local situational variables is an important category in our results. We propose a cyclical framework in which the relationship between attitudes and policy is reciprocal and a change in policy may affect attitudes through learning about details of a policy by experiencing it, or through a change in social norms and framing.