Preserving Water Quality: Challenges and Opportunities for Technological and Policy Innovations

The agricultural nutrient management problem is technologically, economically, politically, and institutionally complex. Nutrient flows from agricultural lands to water bodies are diffuse by nature, difficult to observe and measure at reasonable cost, and there is significant heterogeneity and weather induced stochasticity in the links between input use and polluting discharges. Policies for protecting water quality have therefore tended to focus on managing farming practices rather than environmental outcomes by encouraging the adoption of best management practices. But this highlights another key technological complexity, which is the tremendous spatial heterogeneity, at a sub-field level, in land quality, topography, and proximity to environmentally sensitive areas that exists in agricultural production. One result is tremendous fine-scale variability in cropping systems that can minimize nutrient losses to the environment while remaining competitive land uses. Another is high information, technology, and farm management requirements for such systems. A key economic complexity is that the U.S. agricultural economy is driven by multiple factors (consumer preferences, locations of high density populations, agricultural economic geography) to be nutrient intensive and to move nutrients to nutrient-sensitive environments.