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Demonstration farms having been popping up everywhere lately. They're trendy.
A corp wants farmers to adopt a new practice. An agribusiness wants more uptake of a new piece of tech. So they bring it to a working farm and showcase it at field scale.
"It's not just a research plot," they say. "It's working in the field, on a real farm!"
They're right about one thing: it is working in that field on that farm. But if you're looking to support adoption on other farms, proving it works on a demo farm won't get you there.
When I was an undergraduate, I spent my summers working at the university research farm. During field days, I would hear farmers challenge the results because of how the experiments were designed.
"That's not the real world."
"It doesn't apply to my farm."
Fair enough.
Later, during my master's degree, I was fortunate enough to do research directly on a farmer's field. When I presented those results, I heard a different version of the same criticism.
"That's not my world."
"It doesn't apply to my farm."
Again, fair enough.
I've continued to visit demonstration farms across North America and heard the same criticism repeated.
It's not that the farm isn't making the practice work.
It's that the practice isn't working on my farm.
The benefits of a new practice or technology aren't real for me until I can see them working in the context of my operation—my soils, my equipment, my team, my markets, my logistics.
That's the real problem, and it's one that the demonstration farm approach can't scale to fix.
What then is the role of a demonstration farm?
Proof of concept.
A place to explore new ideas.
A place to test risky bets.
As one corporate executive once described it to me, a place for "breaking things."
That's valuable.
But the "come and see" approach is tried, tested, and—if we're willing to admit it—tired, because we're asking it to do what it was never designed to do.
What we're really saying is,
"Come, take a look!
Ask a few questions.
Then go figure it out yourself."
That will work for a few farmers, but not most.
Seeing it work for someone else is only part of the reason farmers adopt something new.
Awareness alone won't get you across the finish line.
If the goal is to increase adoption of a new practice or technology, we need to broaden our thinking about what people need to make change.
Change isn't just about education. (It isn't just about throwing money at the problem, either). It's about motivation, skills, capacity, resources, culture, and past experience.
If you want to increase uptake, you need a holistic strategy that addresses change readiness—all the complex dimensions that influence how prepared someone is to accept, integrate, and continue with a new practice or technology.
Demonstration farms can play an important role in the early stages of change, but they can't be the entire strategy.
At that point, they're just expensive show-and-tell projects.