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Abstract Innovations in precision agriculture now enable the identification of crop field patches whose retirement offers high environmental benefits and the low opportunity cost of crop yield loss. Precision conservation can lower costs to farmers and payment costs for government agencies. Precision conservation incentive policy should unite elements of land retirement (set-aside) and working lands policies that pay for environmental services. Key decisions surround how to bundle land fragments in a contract, keep contract design simple, evaluate environmental benefits, monitor compliance, and measure the additionality of those benefits.
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Precision Farming at the Nexus of Agricultural Production and the Environment
Precision farming enables agricultural management decisions to be tailored spatially and temporally. Site-specific sensing, sampling, and managing allow farmers to treat a field as a heterogeneous entity. Through targeted use of inputs, precision farming reduces waste, thereby cutting both private variable costs and the environmental costs such as those of agrichemical residuals. At present, large farms in developed countries are the main adopters of precision farming. But its potential environmental benefits can justify greater public and private sector incentives to encourage adoption, including in small-scale farming systems in developing countries. Technological developments and big data advances continue to make precision farming tools more connected, accurate, efficient, and widely applicable. Improvements in the technical infrastructure and the legal framework can expand access to precision farming and thereby its overall societal benefits.
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- PAR ID:
- 10120799
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Annual Review of Resource Economics
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1941-1340
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 313 to 335
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-resource-100518-093929
