Economic evaluation of on-farm conservation practices in the Great Lakes region of North America

Agriculture has long been regarded as a major contributor to wildlife habitat despoliation, soil degradation, and downstream watercourse pollution. It would be possible to largely eliminate natural resource degeneration through judicious application of on-farm conservation practices. Farmers have little economic incentive to conserve because, according to previous research, most conservation techniques have been demonstrated to be unprofitable. The empirical research into three alternative types of conservation practices for this study confirms that two (conservation crops and riparian buffer strips) provide for net costs to farmers, and that the third (conservation soil tillage) is not profitable under all circumstances. At the same time, the research shows that two out of the three sets of practices, namely riparian buffer strips and conservation tillage, can be economically beneficial to society as a whole, This raises the question of whether and to what extent society, as economic gainers, should offer compensation to farmers as economic losers. This study furthermore establishes that not all conservation practices that result in reduced soil erosion will lead to decreased sediment and phosphorus loadings into watercourses; that not all reduced sediment and phosphorus loadings lead to improved water quality; and that, even where an improvement to water quality in chemical, physical, biological and aesthetic terms can be obtained, the costs to society of achieving improvement may exceed the economic benefits. Such outcomes can readily promote disagreements between environmentalists and ecologists on the one hand and socio-economists on the other. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.