Environmental learning occurs when farmers base decisions on observations of “payoff” information. They may observe their own or neighbors’ farms, but it is the empirical results they are using as a guide, not the neighbors themselves. They are looking at farming activities as experiments and assessing such factors as relative advantage, compatibility with existing resources, difficulty of use, and “trialability” ― how well can it be experimented with. But that criterion of “trialability” turns out to be a real problem; it’s true that farmers are always experimenting, but working farms are very flawed laboratories. Farmers cannot set up the controlled conditions of professional test plots in research facilities. Farmers also often confront complex and difficult-to-observe phenomena that would be hard to manage even if they could run controlled experiments. Moreover farmers can rarely acquire payoff information on more than a few of the production methods they might use, which makes the criterion of “relative advantage” hard to measure.
* empirical: 경험적인 ** compatibility: 양립성 *** criterion: 기준