Alternative Spatial Criteria for Targeting Soil and Water Quality Improvements in an Agricultural Watershed

Abstract

The United States Food Security Act of 1985 and the Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act (FACTA) of 1990 contain several landmark provisions for protecting soil and water resources in agriculture. One such provision is conservation compliance that discourages crop production methods that cause excessive soil erosion. Achievement of conservation compliance is expected to improve surface water quality. Farmers who did not implement conservation plans to reduce average erosion rates on highly-erodible fields to acceptable limits before December 1994 lost their eligibility for most farm programs. Current conservation compliance policy targets erosion control at the field level. An alternative to field-level targeting is farmor watershed-level targeting. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the economic and environmental effects of three levels of erosion targeting for conservation compliance; namely, field-, farm-, or watershedlevel targeting. The main hypothesis evaluated is that private and social benefits increase as the level of targeting increases, but at the expense of greater erosion and nonpoint source pollution. This hypothesis isbased on the principle, confirmed by Lau, that the economic efficiency of a policy increases as the policy becomes less restrictive. Private benefit is measured by annual net cash return minus onsite erosion damage. Social benefit is measured by net social benefit and an incremental benefit-cost ratio.