The roles of farmers, scientists, and extension staff in technology development for soil frost control as an adaptation to climate change in Tokachi, Hokkaido, Japan

For any measures of agricultural adaptation to climatic change, it is critical that they be adopted by most farmers in the target region. We investigated farmers’ wide adoption of soil frost control (SFC) measures against the proliferation of volunteer potatoes (VP) due to climate change in the Tokachi region of Hokkaido, Japan, making use of concepts in the diffusion of innovations paradigm. In the initial stage, snowplowing spread as a farmer-invented innovation to suppress VP, but the adopters sometimes encountered undesired outcomes due to insufficient or excessive soil frost. An extension staff brought this problem to the attention of a scientist, who had developed a soil temperature model. With the model, the farmer practice evolved into the SFC technology to attain the optimum soil frost. The technology was implemented in a web-based decision-support system for use by the farmers, which facilitated its wide adoption by farmers across the region. The two critical steps to SFC: the farmer’s invention of snowplowing and the scientist’s development of soil temperature model, were made with no intention for the use to climate change adaptation, instead their use was found on the farmers’ network initially and the network of scientists and extension staffs later.