Assessing the Efficiency of Alternative Best Management Practices to Reduce Nonpoint Source Pollution in the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin (MARB)

Bijay Pokhrel and Krishna P. Paudel

No 170699, 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: We conducted biophysical simulations using MAPSHED to determine the effects of adopting best management practices to reduce nutrients and sediment in a watershed dominated by row crop agriculture and poultry production. Reduction of three water pollutants nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment from adopting different BMPs are used in the cost reducing optimization model. We considered three weather scenarios (dry, normal and wet) and various levels of BMP parameter efficiencies. The nutrient management plan and vegetative buffer are the dominant cost-effective BMPs in the normal and wet weather conditions. In the dry weather scenario, vegetative buffer and stream-bank stabilization are the most cost effective BMPs. The cost of per kilogram of phosphorus reduction ranges from $10 to $40 depending on levels of desired phosphorus level reduction and efficiency parameters used in the model. It is costly to reduce phosphorus in a dry weather scenario perhaps because runoff is minimal and total costs associated with BMPs do not get distributed much on a per unit effluent basis.

Keywords: Environmental; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21
Date: 2014-05-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea14:170699

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.170699

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