Ecological sensemaking in pasture based production systems: evidence from New Zealand dairy farmer responses to extreme weather

Abstract

The aim of this research is to gain understanding about Whiteman and Cooper’s (2011) ecological sensemaking construct by examining how farmers make sense of extreme weather patterns based on scientific information available to them and their own observations of extreme weather in daily practice. Using a qualitative exploratory research design, 15 industry experts and 38 dairy farmers in New Zealand were interviewed to understand the informational cues that farmer notice, how they interpret meaning from those cues and how they translate meaning into decisions and actions. Interview data was collected and analysed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) driven by the Enactment-Selection-Retention sensemaking process (Weick, 1979; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005) and resilience outcomes (Coutu, 2002; Hamel & Valikangas, 2003). The main finding was that most farmers did not take action based on information about extreme weather forecasts from climate science or probabilistic risk calculations. Instead farmers made sense of extreme weather and took action based on their own experience or the local experience of other farmers in nearby rural communities. These results extend Whiteman and Cooper’s (2011) construct in ecological sensemaking in the context of pasture based farming. I introduce two terms to describe the individual and collective levels of ecological sensemaking. Pastoral ecological embeddedness is the extent to which a manager understands local ecological processes in production. Pastoral community embeddedness is the extent to which a manager understands distinctive social relationships in rural communities. More generally, my findings show how natural physical objects in sensemaking are instrumental to resilience. The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (2014) states that farmers are set to endure increasingly frequent extreme weather events from climate change. The implication for policy makers is that, as well as providing textual information about probabilistic risk, farmers in pasture based production systems are well served by information about resilience gained experientially such as from research farms and farm walks.