Conservation Tillage: The Role of Public Policy

The adoption of conservation practices such as conservation tillage, contour farming, filter strips, grassed waterways, terracing, polyacrylamide, and grasses and legumes in rotation can reduce soil erosion and the transport of sediments and chemicals to off-farm water bodies. Several public policies can be used to affect farmers&s; choices of production practices and technologies: education and technical assistance, financial assistance, research and development, land retirement, and regulation and taxes. Most conservation policies attempt to influence the use of conservation tillage through demonstrating or ensuring that net benefits of adoption are positive. Education and technical assistance efforts will succeed in inducing adoption of conservation tillage only by those farmers who can be shown that they will reap net benefits in the long run. The adoption of conservation tillage appears to provide the greatest potential for achieving positive net private benefits, while retaining most of the soil quality improvement achieved during the CRP and coincidentally mitigating soil erosion relative to conventional tillage.