Beyond Participation: Producer Typologies, Personality Traits, and the Intensity of Conservation Reserve Program Enrollment

Conservation program enrollment involves two distinct decisions—whether to participate and how much land to commit—yet most empirical work treats these as a single binary outcome. Using a double-hurdle model applied to survey data from corn-belt crop producers, this study jointly examines the determinants of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) participation and enrollment intensity, with particular attention to farmer typologies and Big-Five-adjacent personality traits. For the participation decision, personality trait proxies are the primary behavioral drivers. Conscientiousness and openness to conservation innovation each significantly increase the probability of enrollment, while farmer typologies—including farm survival, productivist, and traditionalist types—play no independent role once behavioral and structural factors are accounted for. For the enrollment intensity decision, the set of significant predictors shifts considerably. Productivist orientation emerges as the strongest negative predictor of land share committed, while conscientiousness retains a positive but weaker association with enrollment intensity. Social interaction—willingness to coordinate bids with neighboring producers—is the most robust positive predictor, suggesting that peer coordination matters more for the scale of land committed than for the initial enrollment decision. These findings demonstrate that participation and enrollment intensity are governed by distinct behavioral and economic processes, and that incorporating farmer typologies and personality traits into conservation program analysis can meaningfully improve our understanding of who enrolls in CRP and to what extent.