Landscape Performance: Farmer Interactions across Spatial Scales

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

This is a really interesting manuscript that poses and answers research questions, which are of theoretical and practical importance. Although the work focuses on one country, it raises the internationally important issues. The manuscript is based on a well-thought research and deep theoretical treatment of the information. It is written perfectly and referenced appropriately. Principally, I like this work, but also think some additions and improvements (also structural) are necessary.

1)      Introduction: it’d be reasonable to start this section with more general issues related to the UN sustainable development goals, with citation of the related literature.

2)      Introduction should end with the objective and well-posed research questions. However, the subsections 1.1 and 1.2 can form a new section 2 to be called “Conceptual Background”.

3)      The text from the beginning of 2 and before the beginning of 2.1 should be assigned to the new subsection with subsequent re-numbering of the following subsections.

4)      Your section 3 can be merged with the section 2 because they both are about methodology.

5)      Table: what do mean “large”, “medium”, “small”, “young”, etc. in this table?

6)      Why not to give more detailed demographics of your respondents (education, experience, social status, etc.)?

7)      Discussion: you do not need to repeat the research questions.

8)      Discussion: which REGIONAL socio-economical peculiarities affect your findings?

9)      Discussion: how your findings differ from the outcomes of the more or less similar studies in the other countries? If it is country-specific, this should be well-reflected.

10)  As this study is rather complex, it needs Conclusions. There, you have to present 3-5 principal findings and interpretations (from Results and Discussion), limitations (the main is that you focus on one place in one country), and perspectives for further investigations.

11)  The paper is not illustrated. Although this is not serious problem, I encourage to think about inclusion of a simple map of the area, some photographs, and graphic representation of some findings.

Author Response

Please see the attached document for a detailed response to reviewers

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript Landscape performance: Farmer interactions across spatial scales uses qualitative and quantitative methods to explore how the socially constructed "ideal farm" can influence farmer behavior, including discouraging conservation practices. Overall this manuscript offers insights in place and practice, and should be of value to other scholars as well as land management professionals. 

- I find the title to be somewhat odd. Although there are two scales involved in the research (farm and county) that hardly seems to be the emphasis, certainly not to the point that it merits mention in the title. 

Introduction:

Overall well done. A reader without much background knowledge of farming in the Midwest or Place should have no issue following the premise of the authors' research. The paragraph beginning w/ line 137 recognizes the limitations of looking at only "place-making" without invalidating the research presented in the manuscript. 

- The two Research Questions are quite broad. Were there any hypotheses proposed prior to analyzing the results of this work? It may be helpful to readers if they were also included in the manuscript. 

Methods

- In the sentence beginning in line 189 it is not clear how the semi-structured interviews and focus groups were related to each other in time (i.e., which was done first?)

- In the sentence beginning in line 197, the implication is that the semi-structured interviews were not used to develop the focus groups, nor vice versa. This seems to contradict what was written in line 188. 

- How did the authors' locate the original local contacts for snowball sampling? Although one would never presume that the results of the 21 semi-structured interviews were representative in a statistical sense, if may be helpful to readers to know something of the characteristics of the participants in that round of research. Also, a bit more context abou the interviews would be nice. How were they conducted (in-person, phone etc?) If they were done in-person, where specifically were they done? How was data collected during these interviews? (the focus groups were audio-recorded) 

- A bit more context for the focus groups would be nice. Where did the focus groups take place, and about how long did the discussions last?

- Given that it was the lead author who facilitated the focus groups, a statement of their positionality would be helpful to readers.

- One of the benefits of a developmental mixed methods approach is that the first step informs the second. However, it is not totally clear in what way the interviews informed the focus groups, and especially how the qualitative component informed the quantitative component. 

- In line 248, should assessing be italicized? 

- I have never before encountered a threshold of .6 for Chronbach's alpha, however I am not familiar with Cortina's work, and recognize the difficulty of working with small samples. 

- In what way was the sampling strategy used by the authors purposive? (line 282) Were participants from the semi-structured interviews also allowed to complete the survey? 

Results

- Land-based learning to foster dialogue was an important theme identified in the analysis of the qualitative data, yet did not seem to show up in the quantitative survey? What was the rationale behind that decision. 

- On Table 5, knowing the within-subject difference is helpful, but it may be equally (or more) helpful to readers to know the mean demonstrating and assessing scores for each of three farm areas. 

- In the analysis and results, each crop area was considered as a whole. Did the authors look at the results from specific questions or relate them to the qualitative portion of the research? I only ask because it feels as if more could be done in that regard.

Overall, a well written manuscript that makes meaningful contributions to the literature. 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attached document for a detailed response to reviewers

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This is an interesting study, and I see the authors' efforts to explore the application of the influence of a normative landscape. The manuscript is of good quality and the goals are clearly articulated and the methods are sound. I have a few suggestions that will hopefully contribute to improving the paper for publication.

Firstly, the introduction does not adequately state what the problem is, why it is important to study, and how is this going to be addressed better than what we have seen in previous studies.

Secondly, the Mixed Method Approach in this paper refers to the utilization of semi-structured interviews and focus groups. A better integration of logical flow across sections 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 is advisable.

Lastly, a more comprehensive discussion regarding the influence of two types of regionally normative landscapes (road farming and land-based learning) on site-based Farming Practices would enrich the paper.

 

The quality of English language in the article is fine.

Author Response

Please see the attached document for a detailed response to reviewers

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf