Spatial dimensions of trust among Midwestern corn farmers

Current scholarship has portrayed trust as mediating the relationship between farmers and the information sources they rely on to make appropriate management decisions for their farms. In general, it is assumed that the more... [ view full abstract ]

Current scholarship has portrayed trust as mediating the relationship between farmers and the information sources they rely on to make appropriate management decisions for their farms. In general, it is assumed that the more farmers trust an information source, the more frequently farmers will use that source to guide their management decisions. After examining survey responses from row-crop farmers across four Midwestern states (N = 2098), we find evidence to the contrary: information sources that are highly trusted are not necessarily the most frequently used.

Building off a definition of institutional trust, we explore the contextual factors that might influence the development of trust in order to explain why some sources are highly trusted but not as influential on farmers’ decision-making. Using GIS spatial analysis methods, we locate the farm addresses of survey respondents from Michigan and compare their position relative to the GPS locations of public offices run by Michigan State University Cooperative Extension and the commercial offices of Michigan grain dealers. We find that both the numerical count and the spatial distribution of highly trusted and highly used information sources is significantly different than sources that are highly trusted but not frequently used. We use these findings to interrogate the concept of access to information sources for farmers, and to bring more attention to the spatial dimensions of farmers' decision-making processes.