| Since the passage of the 1996 Farm Act, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) has provided over $10 billion in technology adoption subsidies. One of the national conservation priorities in EQIP is water conservation, but it is not known how participation in EQIP by irrigators affects water application rates and decisions to expand or reduce a farm’s irrigated acreage. Using a farm-level panel data set drawn from three national samples of irrigators taken in 1998, 2003, and 2008, this study provides the first national scale econometric estimates of the changes in water application rates and irrigated acreage that result when a farm receives EQIP payments. Due to a five-fold increase in EQIP funding following the 2002 farm bill, the change in... |
