Sediment Damage and Farm Production Costs: A Multiple-Objective Analysis

Abstract

When considering many environmental problems, society is faced with decisions involving multiple objectives and with problems in valuing environmental impacts. This study illustrates a multiple goal approach applicable to land and water resource project evaluations. The approach explicitly confronts the problem of valuing the environmental impacts of sediment and determines the implications of placing alternative relative weights-, on the components of the objective function. The results quantify the tradeoffs between production cost and sediment damage. Agricultural cropland sediment is recognized as the largest nonpoint water pollutant by volume in the United States.' Direct costs associated with sediment include lost reservoir capacity, increased channel and reservoir dredging, increased water treatment, reduced recreational activities, and increased flood damages. Indirect costs arise from the associated transport of agricultural chemicals into waterways. In addition, continued erosion reduces current as well as future productive capacity of agricultural lands. The increasing awareness of the impacts of sediment on environmental quality is leading society to include these impacts in analyses of land and water resource projects. This awareness is illustrated in legislation such as the Iowa Conservancy Law, which extends the authority of the conservancy district commissioners to classify land on the basis of its erodibility, to estab