Discrete choice experiment estimates on the value of soil health attributes in Central Texas

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.