Potential impact of CAP’s Ecological Focus Areas on soil fertility

Christoph Sahrbacher, Mark Brady, Changxing Dong and Amanda Sahrbacher

No 212284, 2015 Conference, August 9-14, 2015, Milan, Italy from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: An indicator of soil fertility is the content of organic matter measured by the share of carbon in the soil, which is negatively affected by many conventional land management practices. As those heavily depend on individual land use decisions, the agent-based model of regional structural change AgriPoliS is applied to assess carbon losses resulting from behaviors and interactions of individual farms. The extended model now considers nitrogen input and the development in soil’s carbon content. Three scenarios are implemented where farms have either to use 7%, 15% or 25% of their land as ecological focus area (EFA). Results show that although carbon losses continue at a slower pace under the 7%-scenario, 25% of the land is to be set aside to stop them completely. However this implies short-term income losses for farmers but better plant resistance and improved soil productivity in the long-run if soil organic matter can be maintained.

Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Land Economics/Use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 12
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cmp, nep-env and nep-pke
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iaae15:212284

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.212284

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