Assessing the Costs and Environmental Consequences of Agricultural Land Use Changes: A Site-Specific , Policy-Scale Modeling Approach

摘要: The growth in federal conservation programs has created a need for policy modeling frameworks capable of measuring micro-level behavioral responses and macro-level landscape changes. This paper presents an empirical model that predicts crop choices, rotations, tillage adoption as function payment levels, profits, other variables at more than 42,000 agricultural sites the National Resource Inventory (NRI) Upper Mississippi River Basin. Predicted changes choices practices are then fed into site-specific environmental production functions to determine nitrate runoff leaching water wind erosion each NRI site. policy-scale is applied case green payments (conservation rotations) Basin, region under scrutiny significant source nutrient loadings River, causing hypoxia Gulf Mexico. Results from this application suggest rotations increase use these practices. However, acreage response inelastic not likely be cost effective on their own addressing problem