Strategies for the diffusion of sustainable agricultural Innovation: an agent based model for the horticultural sector in province of Foggia

With global climate change challenges and its various effects on ecosystems and on resource depletion, bio-wastes emerged as a resource with a significant potential to be employed as a raw material for the production of chemicals, materials and fuels given its abundant volumes generated globally. In particular research carried out at the University of Torino over the last 7 years demonstrated that urban and agriculture wastes are source of soluble bio-organics (SBO substances that have promising performances as chemical auxiliaries for a wide range of bio-based products. Plastic materials containing SBOs are particularly suitable for the manufacture of films for mulching of agricultural soils. This study aims at providing insights into the potential diffusion of mulching films containing SBO. Considering a population of potential adopters of this new product, I set-up a model composed of interacting agents that form a positive or a negative opinion on the new product on the basis of their own preferences and the decisions of their neighbors. Moreover in this study I examine how can policy makers influence the path of mulching films from SBOs diffusion through the implementation of different strategies for innovation’s knowledge intensification, influencing better the speed and the level of SBO mulching films diffusion. In other words I analyzed how policy maker can induce their diffusion. In particular I simulated three kind of possible interventions: one based on a random chosen criteria of the agents which first inoculate the information about the novelty (named injection points) and two rational methods to choose these last. Results show that the three different chosen criteria are significantly different in influencing the level of diffusion but not its speed. From this I concluded that the policy maker should choose between the different strategies those that has the best performance in terms of level of diffusion but it must take into account that it needs time to exploit all the potential influence on innovation diffusion captured by these strategies, and hence to program long term diffusion campaigns. Finally, although this work addresses a single case study, the proposed methodology and the specific findings may pave the way for further investigations that consider potential adopters behavior.