Knowledge of the benefits and costs to water users is required for a complete assessment of policies to create incentives for water quality improving changes in agricultural production. A number of benefit estimation methods are required to handle the varying nature of water quality effects....

USDA has spent more than $4.2 billion on wetland restoration and protection over the last two decades. One challenge in allocating these funds is the lack of information on variations in wetland benefits and costs across the Nation. This report discusses the biophysical impacts of new wetlands...

Historically, long-term agreements offer an upfront payment as opposed to a series of annual payments. Past research suggests that public preferences for upfront payments are greater than the present-value sum of a series of annual payments. If this condition holds, then program costs can be...

Knowledge of the benefits and costs to water users is required for a complete assessment of policies to create incentives for water-quality improving changes in agricultural production. A number of benefit estimation methods are required to handle the varying nature of water quality effects....

Many of the Nation’s conservation programs seek to achieve multiple environmental objectives. Implementing a multi-objective program efficiently requires program managers to balance different environmental and cost objectives. A number of conservation programs use an index approach to...

Application of the tobit model to estimate economic welfare is transferred from the consumer side to the producer side. Supply functions are estimated for multioutput irrigators in the Pacific Northwest. Empirical procedures are then developed for computing expected producer's surplus from the...

Concerns about the impact of farm production on the quality of the Nation's drinking and recreational water resources have risen over the past 10 years. Because point sources of pollution were controlled first, agricultural nonpoint sources have become the Nation's largest remaining single...