Conference Agenda

Despite the existence of widespread payment for ecosystem services programs to incentivize agricultural practices such as cover crops (CCs), adoption remains low. The economics literature has thus devoted considerable attention to the factors that influence enrollment in CC incentive programs, including applications of discrete choice experiments (DCEs) to predict how changes to current programs might impact enrollment and adoption. Most of this work considers changes to only a few program attributes of traditional interest to economists, such as payments and contract lengths, while overlooking contract restrictions on farm operations that directly influence the private benefits and costs of CC adoption, such as the CC varieties that qualify for cost sharing, required seeding rates, and planting deadlines. This paper develops an integrated theoretical and empirical model to evaluate farmers’ enrollment decisions in CC incentive programs, accounting for flexibility in multiple types of contract restrictions that impact the net private benefits of CC adoption. The model is implemented using data from a DCE on CC program enrollment among farmers in Maryland, USA. Results show that enrollment choices are influenced heavily by attributes that are almost universally omitted from DCEs in the literature. Findings suggest the insights that can be provided via DCEs that consider program enrollment within the context of farm operations and the net private benefits of adoption.