UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Conservation programs aimed at boosting environmentally friendly practices by incentivizing farmers may get more bang for their buck by targeting rural farms rather than more urban ones, according to a study led by researchers at Penn State.
In a study published in Land Economics , the team analyzed how likely it was that Pennsylvania farmers would adopt best management practices for clean water conservation, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency encourages by offering incentives to farmers who adopt them.
The researchers found that farmers in more rural areas of the state were more likely to adopt these practices only when provided with financial incentives, while farmers in more urban areas were more likely to adopt these practices voluntarily, regardless of incentives.
Douglas Wrenn, associate professor of environmental and resource economics and lead author on the study, said the findings have implications for policymakers hoping to make these conservation programs more impactful.
"If we assume the benefits are roughly uniform across the state, our research suggests it may be better in terms of cost to target farms that are in much more rural areas," Wrenn said. "Farms in the more urban areas appear to be doing more of these practices on their own, which implies that targeting your dollars to more rural places will give you more bang for your buck."
The Chesapeake Bay watershed, a large portion of which is in Pennsylvania, has been the target of conservation programs for decades, Wrenn said. The EPA has designated maximum pollution levels for these waters, which states are required to comply with as part of the Clean Water Act .
These pollutants include nitrogen and phosphorus, which can enter waterways when cow manure and fertilizer are washed into streams and other waterways. Wrenn said that while the EPA can regulate factories and wastewater facilities, for example, that discharge pollutants into the water, this ability doesn't extend to individual farms. Instead, Wrenn said, regulators turn to incentives, paying farmers if they implement designated best practices such as manure pits and riparian buffer strips.
For these programs to be the most efficient, Wrenn explained that regulators should focus their dollars on paying farmers who wouldn't do these things otherwise, a concept called additionality.
"The idea is that if you're going to take tax dollars to pay someone to do something you consider to be a social good, like cleaning up a stream, you want to use those dollars to make something happen that otherwise wouldn't," he said. "Additionality is considered at 100% if every dollar given to a farmer gets them to do something they wouldn't have ever done without the money."
For the current study, the researchers analyzed data on single-family houses as well as 3,743 farms across 38 counties in Pennsylvania. This allowed the team to measure housing density around each farm, giving them insight into whether the farms were located in a more rural or urban part of the state.
They found that in general, additionality fell by about 10 to 15 percentage points in the highest density areas relative to the lowest density regions. Farms in the most rural places tended to have additionality between 85% and 90%, while farms in more urban areas dropped to between 70% and 75%.
"The difference isn't huge, but it could still amount to millions of dollars a year that these programs could save in terms of targeting certain areas over others," Wrenn said.
While additionality is important to consider, Wrenn said it's still only one piece of the puzzle. Future research could analyze the benefits that come from these programs in certain areas compared to others, in terms of how many people enjoy cleaner waters thanks to farmers implementing these practices.
"It's possible that while additionality is lower in urban areas, these practices may help clean up streams and rivers where there are many more people on a daily basis," Wrenn said. "If that's the case, then it could very well be better to target the more urban areas because while additionality is lower, the overall benefits could be greater. And that's something we could analyze in the future."
Junyi Hua, City University of Macau, and H. Allen Klaiber, Ohio State University, also co-authored this study.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture helped support this research.
