The carrot or the stick? Drivers of California farmer support for varying groundwater management policies

Growing demand for groundwater, coupled with the projected threats to groundwater supplies and impacts, has led to an increased focus on policy options for groundwater management. Globally, agriculture is the largest human-use of water, making farmers a critical stakeholder for policy engagement. In California, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a comprehensive groundwater policy, was signed into law in 2014. Here we explore farmer perspectives of groundwater availability and groundwater management policy preferences through a mail survey of farmers (n = 137) in Yolo County, California, implemented in 2017. Overall, farmers expressed widespread concern for the five applicable 'undesirable results' considered under SGMA and the majority of farmers felt that these conditions were either occurring now or were likely to occur in the next ten years. The majority of farmers were supportive of individual or incentive-based policy options to address groundwater concerns (e.g. voluntary adoption of water management practices). However, a sizable group of farmers were also supportive of regulatory-based policy options (e.g. moratorium on drilling new wells). Multivariate regression models suggest that for both kinds of policies, individual support for SGMA positively predicts groundwater management policy support. However, for regulatory-based policies, subjective norms - a farmers' belief that the majority of other farmers support SGMA-is also an important predictor of regulatory policy approaches along with a number of other factors. These results suggest that, should regulatory approaches for SGMA implementation be necessary, fostering subjective norms among farmers may be an important mechanism to achieving farmer support.