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Abstract Increasing the resilience of agricultural landscapes requires fundamental changes to the dominant commodity production model, including incorporating practices such as reduced tillage, cover cropping, and extended rotations that reduce soil disturbance while increasing biological diversity. Increasing farmer adoption of these conservation systems offers the potential to transform agriculture to a more vibrant, resilient system that protects soil, air, and water quality. Adoption of these resilience practices is not without significant challenges. This paper presents findings from a participatory effort to better understand these challenges and to develop solutions to help producers overcome them. Through repeated, facilitated discussions with farmers and agricultural and conservation professionals across the U.S. state of Michigan, we confronted the policy, economic, and structural barriers that are inhibiting broader adoption of conservation systems, as well as identified policies, programs, and markets that can support their adoption. What emerged was a complex picture and dynamic set of challenges at multiple spatial scales and across multiple domains. The primary themes emerging from these discussions were barriers and opportunities, including markets, social networks, human capital, and conservation programs. Exacerbating the technical, agronomic, and economic challenges farmers face at the farm level, there are a host of community constraints, market access and availability problems, climatic and environmental changes, and policies (governmental and corporate) that cross‐pressure farmers when it comes to making conservation decisions. Understanding these constraints is critical to developing programs, policies, and state and national investments that can drive adoption of conservation agriculture.
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Predicting the spatial variation in cost-efficiency for agricultural greenhouse gas mitigation programs in the U.S.
Abstract BackgroundTwo major factors that determine the efficiency of programs designed to mitigate greenhouse gases by encouraging voluntary changes in U.S. agricultural land management are the effect of land use changes on producers’ profitability and the net sequestration those changes create. In this work, we investigate how the interaction of these factors produces spatial heterogeneity in the cost-efficiency of voluntary programs incentivizing tillage reduction and cover-cropping practices. We map county-level predicted rates of adoption for each practice with the greenhouse gas mitigation or carbon sequestration benefits expected from their use. Then, we use these bivariate maps to describe how the cost efficiency of agricultural mitigation efforts is likely to vary spatially in the United States. ResultsOur results suggest the combination of high adoption rates and large reductions in net emissions make reduced tillage programs most cost efficient in the Chesapeake Bay watershed or the Upper Mississippi and Lower Missouri sub-basins of the Mississippi River. For programs aiming to reduce net emissions by incentivizing cover-cropping, we expect cost-efficiency to be greatest in the areas near the main stem of the Mississippi River within its Middle and Lower sections. ConclusionsMany voluntary agricultural conservation programs offer the same incentives across the United States. Yet spatial variation in profitability and efficacy of conservation practices suggest that these uniform approaches are not cost-effective. Spatial targeting of voluntary agricultural conservation programs has the potential to increase the cost-efficiency of these programs due to regional heterogeneity in the profitability and greenhouse gas mitigation benefits of agricultural land management practices across the continental United States. We illustrate how predicted rates of adoption and greenhouse gas sequestration might be used to target regions where efforts to incentivize cover-cropping and reductions in tillage are most likely to be cost -effective.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1828571
- PAR ID:
- 10490247
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Carbon Balance and Management
- Volume:
- 19
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1750-0680
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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