Drivers of peri-urban farmers’ land-use decisions: an analysis of factors and characteristics
Suranga Wadduwage
Abstract
Loss of agricultural land due to urban sprawl has negative impacts on community lifestyles and green landscapes in peri-urban areas. However, researchers rarely investigate the complex decisions made by landowners and land managers about changes in farmland at the fringes of cities.A postal questionnaire was sent to 1,600 farmland owners and managers on the fringes of Adelaide, South Australia, to elicit information on internal and external factors driving their land-use decisions. Descriptive statistics were developed for farmers’ demographics, farming life, industry and motivations in managing land while investigating 28 primary factors representing the socio-economic, environmental and institutional land governance influences on land-use decisions.Results demonstrate the advantage of deriving latent factors to identify these land-use transformations, as they identify a different set of factors with higher importance than the farmers’ recommendations alone. These findings can improve the knowledge of farmers’ land-use decision-making behaviour to model complex land-use transitions on city fringes.