Event: Department Seminar

Location: 368A Heady Hall

Contact Person: David Hennessy

Title: Can Farmer-Led Initiatives Reduce Nonpoint Source Pollution?

Abstract: Half of the country’s surface waters fail to meet quality standards for recreation, aquatic life, or as sources for drinking water. Today, agriculture is the leading cause of water quality impairment in the United States. Pollution from non-point sources, such as agriculture, is largely unregulated. Instead, non-point source agriculture pollution is addressed primarily through voluntary management practices pursued by landowners. We study an innovative policy in Wisconsin: the Producer-Led Watershed Protection Grant Program. This program provides annual grants to a HUC-12 watershed or a collection of neighboring watersheds to facilitate farmer-led management and allocation of funds to improve water quality. To empirically identify the causal effects of the program, we implement a shift-share instrumental variables strategy that exploits exogenous state-level changes in the program’s budgetary cap—the shifts—interacted with local watershed crop acreage in 2010— the shares. We find that an increase in acres that participate in a Producer-Led Watershed Group leads to a statistically significant reduction in phosphorus concentrations, suggesting these groups are a viable policy tool for improving water quality.