production management (measured by use of crop rotations), as well as the off-site environmental
factor identified by the presence of an adjacent water body, stream, or wetland, negatively influence
the corn-producing acres for the field (but positively affect structural practice acres). Even though
farm size appears to play a somewhat stronger role in these decisions than do individual field-
specific environmental factors, the significance of multiple site-specific environmental factors
highlights the critical importance of accounting for these factors (together with other socio-
economic factors) in the producer field acreage allocation decision.
Input-Price Field-Acreage Response Elasticities
The critically-important effect of accounting for additional socio-environmental factors lies
in their impact on estimated input-price elasticities for field-level corn acreage response for each of
the four technology-based acreage supply equations.12 Not accounting for appropriate
field/farm/environmental decision factors could either under- or over-estimate technology-specific
price elasticity of acreage response for either conservation program participants or non-participants
(table 4). This result is important, particularly when addressing conservation program practice
adoption impacts associated with alternative conservation program options.
Estimated elasticity results show that not accounting for socio-environmental decision
factors will generally under-estimate corn acreage response across field technology choices for
program non-participants. On the other hand, for conservation program participants, not accounting
for these decision factors will likely under-estimate the acreage response elasticity for corn fields
with infield and/or perimeter-field structures, but over-estimate acreage response for corn fields
with no structural practices present. In addition, the under- or over-estimate of acreage response is
model estimation results were rather robust. However, in the interest of conceptual completeness, the installation
timing variables were kept in the final estimated model.
12 The kth input-price elasticity of acreage response for the jth technology choice and pth program participation class is
measured as [∂Aj,p / ∂pk][pk / Aj,p] = [αj,p,k • (pk / Py)].
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