The Saint-Esprit watershed project was initiated to address the issue of nonpoint source agricultural pollution and relies on the adoption of sustainable practices tested on-farm by willing farmers. To study the economic impact of an increasing erosion constraint at the farm and the watershed scales, four Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) models, corresponding to three selected farms and the watershed, were built. The models maximize the sum of field net margins subject to singleness of field use, animal nutrient requirements, and erosion. / Scenario results show that increasing the erosion constraint: (1) reduces soil loss from agricultural production; (2) forces cropping patterns and farming practices to change; (3) reduces profits; and (4) induces marginal and average costs to increase at an increasing rate. Also, with comparable average soil losses per hectare, farms with lower net margins would be worse off if the erosion target was set at the watershed level.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.20815 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Dissart, Jean-Christophe. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Agricultural Economics.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001643289, proquestno: MQ44158, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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