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Environmental Regulation in Agriculture and The Adoption of Environmental Technology

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Flexible Incentives for the Adoption of Environmental Technologies in Agriculture

Part of the book series: Natural Resource Management and Policy ((NRMP,volume 17))

Abstract

Agriculture in the United States has been the subject of numerous government incentive programs over the years. These programs have been designed to achieve a wide variety of goals that include supply control, cropland conversion, soil conservation and environmental quality. A variety of incentive mechanisms have been used to achieve these goals. Incentives for protecting and enhancing water quality come from two different programmatic directions. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a long history of promoting natural resource stewardship through various forms of voluntary assistance (carrots), such as education, technical assistance and cost sharing. Water quality programs that have arisen from the Clean Water Act (CWA) and state water quality protection laws can be of the variety (stick), where farmers are forced through command-and-control or other incentive mechanisms to adopt alternative management practices.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Washington, DC, USA

    Marc Ribaudo & Margriet F. Caswell

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  1. Marc Ribaudo
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  2. Margriet F. Caswell
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Frank Casey Andrew Schmitz Scott Swinton David Zilberman

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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Ribaudo, M., Caswell, M.F. (1999). Environmental Regulation in Agriculture and The Adoption of Environmental Technology. In: Casey, F., Schmitz, A., Swinton, S., Zilberman, D. (eds) Flexible Incentives for the Adoption of Environmental Technologies in Agriculture. Natural Resource Management and Policy, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4395-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4395-0_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5888-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-4395-0

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