Evaluating the Efficiency-Participation Tradeoff in Agricultural Conservation Programs: The Effect of Reverse Auctions, Spatial Targeting, and Higher Offered Payments

Gregory Howard, Wendong Zhang (), Adriana Valcu-Lisman and Philip Gassman

Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications from Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University

Abstract: Using a survey of 430 farmer respondents in the Boone and North Raccoon River watersheds in Iowa, we examine the impacts of three program innovations-reverse auctions, spatially targeted payments, and higher offered payments-on agricultural water conservation program efficiency and participation by farmers. We combine farmer responses to a discrete choice experiment offering voluntary conservation contracts with township-level estimates of per-acre nitrogen reductions from each practice derived from the process-based ecohydrological Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. Using a random-parameters logit model, we show that both cost-reducing and benefit-boosting interventions reduce costs per projected pound of nitrogen removed from the watershed for each practice and thus are more cost-effective than the prevailing current cost-share programs. However, we find that these interventions can reduce participation by 30%-70%. Furthermore, we find cover crop contracts are far more cost-effective than no-till/strip-till split N application contracts.

Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dcm, nep-env and nep-isf
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.card.iastate.edu/products/publications/pdf/21wp622.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)
https://www.card.iastate.edu/products/publications/synopsis/?p=1332 Online Synopsis (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Evaluating the Efficiency-Participation Tradeoff in Agricultural Conservation Programs: The Effect of Reverse Auctions, Spatial Targeting, and Higher Offered Payments (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ias:cpaper:21-wp622

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications from Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().