Environmental Conservation in Agriculture: Land Retirement versus Changing Practices on Working Land

The study develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the allocation of conservation funds via selectively o ering incentive payments to farmers for enrolling in one of two mutually exclusive agricultural conservation programs: retiring land from production or changing farming practices on land that remains in production. We investigate how the existence of a prexed budget allocation between the programs a ects the amounts of environmental bene ts obtainable under alternative policy implementation schemes. The framework is applied to a major agricultural production region using eld-scale data in conjunction with empirical models of land retirement and conservation tillage adoption, and a biophysical process simulation model for the environmental bene ts of carbon sequestration and reduction in soil erosion.