A UC Berkeley Ph.D. student named Liz Carlisle has written a smart NY Times piece providing some examples of how farmers in rural places such as Conrad, Montana and Valier, Montana are making "greener" choices in production in order to cope with the new conditions they face. These guys are not Berkeley hippies . Instead, they are profit maximizing business people who need to adapt. They have the right incentives to experiment and search for new solutions and they are finding them. That was the whole idea of my Climatopolis book. This is how we will adapt through experimentation and "small ball".
A quote from the piece:
"I interviewed people like Jerry Habets, a barley grower in Conrad, Mont. Three dry years at the turn of the millennium left him desperately searching for answers. Bankrupt, divorced and about to lose his family’s 87-year-old homestead, Mr. Habets tried the Bible. Then he went to a psychic. And then he went organic. That improved his soil so it could store more water."
An under-researched topic is local social learning. Now that Jerry Habets has figured out a constructive strategy, how quickly do his neighbors imitate him? How do good ideas diffuse? Development economists such as Conley and Udry have studied this but we now need similar studies in the U.S. A serious field experiment research design would use randomization to achieve exogenous initial conditions and then watch for how the idea spreads across space.
In English, take a random sample of 500 farmers and and choose 100 at random to receive the treatment of some trusted excellent advice from the UC Berkeley extension experts at ARE. Ideally this advice and or new capital equipment would be related to adapting to climate change. For example, should the farmers grow using different techniques or slightly change their choice of crops.
These farmers would be asked at the time that they are "treated" to fill out a social network roster listing who are their buddies and who the swap ideas with. Three years after the treatment takes place, the research team would survey their buddies and the treated farmers' nearest physical neighbors to see if the idea is spreading across communities. If to implement the idea requires upfront costs then the research team could randomize the size of a subsidy to lower the cost for a farmer to try this new strategy.
The payoff of this research design would be new knowledge concerning our willingness to experiment with new ideas and to adapt on our own solely due to the pursuit of narrow self interest.
The research team could then measure the "treatment effect" of their intervention in terms of the direct impact on productivity of the treated farmer and the spillover effects on farmers in the control group but who are connected to the farmer. An ambitious research team could further ask the "treated friends" who their friends are and see if the social multiplier effect extends "several generations".