Does temporary land retirement promote organic adoption? Evidence from the Conservation Reserve Program

Abstract

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) allows agricultural producers to temporarily remove environmentally sensitive farmland from production in exchange for a yearly rental payment. While enrolled in the CRP, land typically complies with standards for organic certification, which prohibit the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers for three years prior to harvest. In this paper, we study the extent to which recent participation in the CRP promotes organic certification. We do so by estimating the relationship between exiting CRP contracts and new organic certifications at the county level over the years 2011–2020. Our primary results are based on an instrumental variables estimator, where we use the number of expiring CRP contracts as an instrument for endogenous net-exiting CRP contracts. We find that the exit of land from the CRP leads to increases in organic adoption, and estimate a 0.029% increase in new organic operations in response to a 1% increase in net-exiting CRP contracts. By highlighting this important co-effect of the CRP, our analysis contributes to contemporary discussions exploring the long-term linkages between land conservation policies, organic agriculture, and other conservation practices.