Understanding farmers’ perceptions of and preferences towards agroforestry is essential to identify systems with the greatest likelihood of adoption to inform successful rural development projects. In this study we offer a novel approach for evaluating agroforestry systems from the farmer perspective. The approach couples rapid rural appraisal and normative optimisation techniques to determine favourable land-use compositions for meeting various socio-economic and ecological goals, based on farmers’ empirical knowledge and preferences. We test our approach among smallholder farmers in Eastern Panama, obtaining data from household interviews and using hierarchical cluster analysis to identify farm groups with similar land-use and income characteristics. We found that moderate differences in farmers’ perceptions between these groups altered the type and share of agroforestry included in the optimised land-use portfolios that balance the achievement of 10 pre-selected socio-economic and ecological objectives. Such differences provide valuable information about potential acceptability of agroforestry within each group. For example, we found that farmers who derive most of their farm income from crops may be more willing to adopt silvopasture, whereas farmers who are more economically dependent on cattle may benefit from diversifying their land-use with alley cropping. We discuss the potential of this modelling approach for participatory land-use planning, especially when dealing with small sample sizes and uncertainty in datasets.

中文翻译：

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通过多目标优化探索农民对农林业的看法：巴拿马东部的测试应用

了解农民对农林业的看法和偏好对于确定最有可能采用的系统为成功的农村发展项目提供信息至关重要。在这项研究中，我们提供了一种从农民角度评估农林业系统的新方法。该方法结合快速农村评估和规范优化技术，根据农民的经验知识和偏好，确定满足各种社会经济和生态目标的有利土地利用构成。我们在巴拿马东部的小农中测试我们的方法，从家庭访谈中获取数据，并使用层次聚类分析来识别具有相似土地利用和收入特征的农场群体。我们发现，这些群体之间农民认知的适度差异改变了优化土地利用组合中包含的农林业的类型和份额，这些组合平衡了 10 个预选的社会经济和生态目标的实现。这些差异提供了关于每个组内农林业的潜在可接受性的宝贵信息。例如，我们发现大部分农业收入来自作物的农民可能更愿意采用林牧，而经济上更依赖牛的农民可能会受益于通过胡同种植实现土地利用的多样化。我们讨论了这种建模方法在参与式土地利用规划方面的潜力，尤其是在处理小样本量和数据集的不确定性时。