There has been great interest in recent decades in “ecosystem services”. One of the services most often mentioned is the retention of nutrients. I construct a simple model of agricultural land use under a regulatory requirement that nutrient loading cannot exceed a fixed ceiling develop...

There has been considerable recent interest in the idea that farms can produce both food and a variety of ecosystem services. One particularly intriguing notion is that farmers might find it in their own interest to adopt an “ecosystem services” approach to production in preference to a...