Structural Conservation Practices in U.S. Corn Production: Evidence on Environmental Stewardship by Program Participants and Non-Participants

system. The results here imply that producers likely do recognize the productivity/profitability
benefits of program participation/incentives under a rising input cost environment.

An increase in agricultural wages results in a similar effect as that for nitrogen prices, but
with a different emphasis. Here, the effect of an increase in agricultural wages, for program non-
participants, is to reduce adoption of conservation structures, while it also encourages adoption
through greater conservation program participation. The stronger effect, however, appears to be
focused on reduced adoption of perimeter-field structures by program non-participants, but with
program participants emphasizing increased adoption of these structures. For diesel-fuel prices, a
price increase will have an opposite effect, likely because the effect here reflects a field-level cost
(or productive capacity, i.e., scale) effect. For non-participants, an increase in diesel-fuel prices will
likely encourage these producers to give increased priority to the productivity benefits of
conservation structures while also reducing the field-level costs as more field acres are devoted to
conservation structures. On the other-hand, increased diesel-fuel prices will also discourage
conservation program participation, resulting in corn fields with fewer acres devoted to
conservation structural acres. These results likely imply that past conservation program incentives
have not been sufficient to overcome a field-level cost (scale) effect associated with increased
energy costs.

It is also not surprising that for program participants, the coefficient signs for the three price
parameters are the reverse of those for non-participants. In addition, what is of greater importance
here is the stronger significance of these parameters within the perimeter-structure equation for
program participants. These results may reflect a shift for these producers from less reliance on the
influence of productivity/profitability effects, accounted for more via the non-participant equations,
to a larger reliance on the influence of a field-level cost (or scale) effect.

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