Horticultural Producers' Willingness to Adopt Water Recirculation Technology in the Mid-Atlantic Region

Abstract

In response to economic and environmental concerns, Water-Recycling Technologies (WRT) have been developed to reduce water consumption and surface run-off in horticultural operations. Water recirculation provides the potential for water conservation and may also reduce grower costs in the long run. However, WRT comes with increased risk of disease from water-borne pathogens such as Pythium and Phytophthora, which can cause devastating plant losses. In addition, WRT entail infrastructure investment costs to capture, treat, and recirculate water. These cost and disease concerns dissuade some growers from adopting WRT. More information is needed about producers’ irrigation and disease management practices and their attitudes toward containment and recirculation of irrigation runoff. A mail survey was administered in February 2013 to horticultural nursery growers in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Information was gathered about the firm and respondents’ demographic characteristics, plus production, irrigation, and disease management practices. The survey incorporates a choice experiment analyzing willingness to accept water recycling based upon hypothetical disease outbreak and water shortage probabilities and associated percentage cost increases. This information is related to the respondent’s recycling choices using a conditional logit model to evaluate the effects of disease probability, drought probability, and water recirculation cost on producers’ willingness to adopt waterrecycling technologies.