Long-term Objective

1. To provide information for policy on selected types of control technologies, cropping systems, and regions for more efficient nutrient reduction strategies.

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Short-term Objective

1. To estimate the coats to growers from implementing selected BMP's to reduce estuarine nutrient loadings.

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Accomplishments

I. Updated and assembled the costs to a typical grower to produce corn, soybeans, or cotton.

II. Estimated the cost to growers of implementing conservation tillage, controlled drainage, and vegetative filter strips.

III. Projected the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus in surface and subsurface runoff for the Neuse basin using Soil Science and Biological and Agricultural field test results given cropping practice and BMP's.

1V. Provide a theoretically sound and methodologically consistent structure to estimate the costs to growers of nutrient reduction.

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Significance

So more accurately estimate the economic costs of nutrient control, it is pertinent to include factors that influence the marginal costs of increasing water quality. This analysis incorporates three major nutrient runoff-influencing characteristics: (1) cropping system, (2) control technology, and (3) environmental characteristics. The costs of nutrient reduction are affected by the particular cropping system implemented, where cropping system consists of a crop, tillage practice, and region within eastern North Carolina. Nutrient reduction is also dependent upon type of control strategy. This analysis considers three controls - controlled drainage, conservation tillage, and vegetative filter strips. Last, and often overlooked, are environmental characteristics that affect the amount of nutrient loadings downstream via transport, as well as those characteristics that affect the amount of estuarine nutrient loading by influencing field-level runoff. This analysis includes soil type and gradient as influential environmental characteristics. By including these three arguments, estimates of the incremental costa of reducing nutrient loadings at the estuary may be derived. This is quite different than analyses that simply use engineering cost estimates of control technologies and field-level reduction strategies. These analyses provide incomplete estimates of the costs of nutrient reduction in downstream estuarine waters.

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Future Plans

1. Complete coat estimations/simulations; further refine projections of field-level runoff that enter estuarine waters.

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Published by: North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service

Publication Number:

Last Electronic Revision: January 1997 (MSD)

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