Abstract
Conservation practices focusing on improving the soil and water quality of working lands are implemented across the United States, supported partially through the United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service cost-share or incentive payment programs. We assess whether participation in federal conservation support programs induces a change in the number of conservation practices adopted by farmers. We also identify the factors that affect the adoption intensity of different best management practices. We use survey data collected from Louisiana farmers and estimate models using the matching method and Poisson quasi-likelihood model. We find that participation in the cost-share or incentive program leads to an increase in the number of conservation practices on the farms. Similarly, the use of precision technology application and farm being integrated are likely to have a higher number of on-farm conservation practices. Results have implications for federal working lands conservation support programs in the United States.
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Notes
1 acre = 0.40469 hectares.
LMFP assists farmers in voluntarily addressing farm production and resource management concerns that are essential for agricultural sustainability. Being listed in the Louisiana Master Farmer Program database does not necessarily mean that the farmers belong to that program. Therefore, the comprehensive database of LMFP represents the general farmers’ population.
We used variables such as age, farming experience, education, and farm income to assess the representativeness of survey data to the farmer population in the state. According to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, the Louisiana averages for farmer’s age and experience are 58.4 years and 16 years, respectively. In our study, the average age of farmers and average years of experience are 55 years and 18 years, respectively. Most of Louisiana’s farm revenue is < $500,000, which holds in our case. The proportion of farmers completing some college is 27% for Louisiana and 21% in our study. All these suggest that the survey data are reflective of the farmer population in the state.
We consider farmer as a participant (=1) in the conservation if he/she is enrolled in at least one of the EQIP/CSP programs. We exclude other conservation programs in this analysis because they are not primarily focused on working lands.
EQIP provides financial and technical assistance to producers and landowners to plan and install structural and land management practices to reduce water pollution and other environmental problems. In 2019, EQIP contract enrolled 13 million acres of farmland (Source: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40763.pdf). CSP contracts are for 5 years with an opportunity to extend if a farmer fulfills the initial contract and agrees to achieve additional conservation objectives. Contract payments are made for existing activities, additional activities, and supplemental activities annually. For more information about payments for practices under CSP in Louisiana, readers are directed to https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/programs/financial/?cid=nrcseprd1328426.
If x = z, two solutions appear during estimation. If x and z are distinct, identification is possible only with at least one variable in z that is not in x (Staub and Winkelmann 2013).
An alternative approach to our analysis is to model only the most adopted practices using a multivariate probit model. Given the small number of observations and lack of model convergence, we did not pursue that route.
Our goodness-of-fit test rejected the validity of the Poisson model (Deviance goodness-of-fit = 239.93; P = 0.0000). This is because the Poisson model requires the mean and variance to be equal for the model to be a valid one. In addition, our model had a mean value of 10.05 with a variance of more than double the mean value, i.e., 27.12. So, PQL is a better choice to account for the overdispersion of the count dataset (Cameron and Trivedi 2005). PQL considered dispersion parameter = 2.38, deviance = 239.93 and χ2 (93) = 116.51 for our dataset.
We suspect the treatment variable—participation in a conservation program—to be correlated with unobserved factors, thus likely making it endogenous. We use Durbin and Wu-Hausman test to test for potential endogeneity issue. The test failed to reject the null that variables are exogenous (Durbin χ2 (1) = 0.037, P value = 0.87; Wu-Hausman F (1, 92) = 0.033, P value = 0.85), thus making results from PQL valid.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the support from the LSU AgCenter Master Farmer Program and LSU Global Network during the implementation phase of the project that resulted in this paper. We would also like to thank Hua Wang and Dependra Bhatta for their constructive comments during the earlier stage of this paper.
Funding
This study was partially funded by the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service project (Grant number: FX17BF-10777R023) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (Grant number: 94483). Paudel’s time on this paper was funded by USDA Hatch Projects #94483 and #94382.
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Pathak, S., Paudel, K.P. & Adusumilli, N.C. Impact of the Federal Conservation Program Participation on Conservation Practice Adoption Intensity in Louisiana, USA. Environmental Management 68, 1–16 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-021-01477-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-021-01477-8