Discrete choice experiment estimates on the value of soil health attributes in Central Texas
通过离散选择实验，估计了德克萨斯州农民对改善土壤健康属性（如水分入渗、表面压实和有机质含量）的支付意愿，发现农民平均愿意为水分入渗改善支付每英亩每年50-100美元。
When farmers adopt conservation tillage, they are making a management change that is expected to improve manageable characteristics of soil health. The current literature on the value of soil health, however, primarily focuses on the value of inherent soil characteristics. In this paper we close the gap in the literature by estimating the value of improvements in soil health. Using a sample of farmers in Texas' Brazos River Watershed and a stated-preference discrete-choice experiment, we elicit preferences for improvements in water infiltration, surface compaction, and organic matter content, characteristics that can be realistically improved by adopting a conservation tillage. For soil improvements roughly equivalent to what could be achieved by adopting no-till, we find that, on average, farmers are willing to pay $50–100 per acre per year to improve water infiltration, $20–50 to reduce surface compaction, and $2–11 per acre to improve organic matter content. We examine preference heterogeneity using sub-samples of the population, latent class specifications, and mixed-logit models, and find substantial variation in willingness to pay across farmers. Our findings offer insights into the value farmers place on soil health, but also that there is a great deal of variation in those values, which may help explain why soil conservations practices are not widely used in our study region. • Farmers in the Brazos River Watershed value water infiltration improvements over organic matter. • Willingness to pay for soil health improvements varies by farmer characteristics and attitudes. • Farmers in the Brazos River Watershed would pay $92 for soil health gains from conservation tillage.