ABSTRACT
Increasing concern about environmental quality degradation is drawing attention towards alternative strategies and policies to reduce agricultural run-off of nutrients and sediment. Run-off may be reduced either by reducing the use of polluting inputs and/or by encouraging the adoption of conservation technologies that increase the effectiveness with which inputs
are used by plants and reduce the portion of input that is wasted and converted into pollution. Such technologies have also been referred to as input-augmenting technologies and as complementary technologies; the former because they increase input productivity and reduce the use of polluting inputs per unit output (Abler and Shortle, 1995), and the latter because they have the potential to provide both economic and environmental benefits (Office of Technology Assessment, 1995). Examples include precision technologies that
can reduce nitrogen use per bushel of com and nitrate run-off (National Research Council, 1997; Khanna and Zilberman, 1997), drip irrigation that can reduce water use and polluted drainage per unit output (Caswell and Zilberman, 1986), high accuracy
pesticide application technologies that increase the
efficiency of pesticide applications (Hall and Fox,
1997), integrated pest management (IPM) and geneti-
cally modified seeds such as Bt cotton that reduce
pesticide use per unit output (Klotz-Ingram et al.,
The extent to which these technologies are input-
saving, pollution-reducing and/or yield-increasing
varies across microunits with heterogeneous land
quality is analyzed by Caswell and Zilberman (1986)
and Caswell and Shoemaker (1993). While there exist
some private incentives to adopt such technologies
(Cooper and Keim, 1996), these incentives may be in-
sufficient to induce socially desired levels o f adoption
due to the external nature of the costs of pollution,
thus, necessitating government intervention (National
Research Council, 1997).
