 Pesticide Use and Cropland Consolidation in California Organic AgricultureHanlin Wei, Rachael Goodhue and Minghua Zhang Ecological Economics, 2024, vol. 218, issue C Abstract: As has long been the case for conventional agriculture, organic agriculture is increasingly characterized by the consolidation of production into the hands of larger operations. Using historical pesticide applications records from the California Pesticide Use Report (PUR), this study identified individual organic fields, to document the occurrence of cropland consolidation, and assess the correlation between cropland consolidation and pesticide use. Our results show that pesticide use is correlated with the consolidation of organic cropland. Farms with more organic acreage applied sulfur and fixed copper pesticides more frequently after controlled for the crop type and field size. As the result, larger farms had greater environmental impacts on surface water and smaller impacts on soil and air because sulfur and fixed copper are more toxic to fish and algae, and less toxic to earthworms and have lower Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) emissions than other pesticides used in organic fields. Keywords: Organic agriculture; Pesticide use; Cropland consolidation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:218:y:2024:i:c:s0921800924000181 DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108121 Access Statistics for this article Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier |
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