Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
flood buffering capability, wildlife habitat, open space). A similar finding was that
a 1% rise in surrounding conservation lands (e.g., natural preserves, parks, public
forests) raised parcel prices by 2%. Value for purposes of recreation and crop irri-
gation likely explains the finding that parcel prices rose by 6% for each kilometer
closer to a river (Ma and Swinton 2011). That some of these sources of landscape-
level value result from land management choices—set-aside of conservation land
and preservation of wetlands—points to the potential for landowners to improve
land values by coordinating management across parcels within a given landscape, a
direction deserving future research.
Valuing Ecosystem Services from Improved Cropping Practices
While land prices embody the local value of certain ecosystem services that emerge
from landscape composition, other methods are needed to measure environmental
values of specific farm management practices.
Developing estimates of economic values due to specific management practices is
a two-stage process. Applying the framework of Collins et al. (2011), the first stage
is to measure the changes in ecosystem service flows resulting from a change in crop
management practices. The change must be measured from some baseline, such as
the conventional corn-soybean-wheat management system of the KBS LTER Main
Cropping Systems Experiment (MCSE) (Table 3.1) (Robertson and Hamilton 2014,
Chapter 1, this volume). The second stage converts those changed service flows into
economic values. As economic values, these are based on real or hypothetical markets
that measure how much the people who gain would be willing to pay to obtain the
changed service flows, or how much the people who lose would accept in order to be
equally well off as they were before the change (Polasky and Segerson 2009). So, for
example, if farmers reduce fertilizer use that prevents a lake from becoming eutrophic,
economic value would be measured on the demand side by how much the lake users
are willing to pay for maintaining its uses and on the supply side by how much farmers
would be willing to accept as compensation for any income lost due to reduced fertil-
izer use. Where markets for ecosystem services or their near substitutes exist, prices
may reflect an economic equilibrium where the value to those who gained from a spe-
cific change in ecosystem service is in balance with the compensation to those who lost
by making the necessary management changes. Where markets do not exist, aspects of
markets can be simulated to infer economic values.
The MCSE results point to several ecosystem services that alternative manage-
ment of cropping systems can provide: nutrient cycling (biological in lieu of syn-
thetic chemical fertilizer supplements), crop pest regulation (via natural biocontrol),
climate regulation (via reduced greenhouse gas emissions), and water-quality regu-
lation (via reduced nutrient leaching to groundwater and runoff to surface waters).
Details can be found in other chapters in this volume (Paul et al. 2015, Chapter 5
in this volume; Landis and Gage 2015, Chapter 8 in this volume; Hamilton 2015,
Chapter 11 in this volume; and Gelfand and Robertson 2015, Chapter 12 in this
volume).
