Agricultural lands offer an abundance of environmental goods and services, yet face residential development pressures. Conservation easements are frequently used to protect both productive land and environmental amenities. The landowner retains ownership, and may donate development rights or receive compensation for permanently limiting development on the property. Focus groups were conducted with agricultural landowners in Wyoming and Colorado to explore factors affecting their preferences for conservation easements. Results from the focus groups reveal that landowners have concerns about providing easements in perpetuity. They also considered public access to and loss of managerial control of their property as obstacles. Focus-group results indicated that landowners valued the provision of public goods, such as wildlife habitat and open space, to neighboring communities, and generally felt something important would be lost to their communities if their lands were developed. Addressing landowner concerns could potentially increase the volume of easement transactions.

Pollinators provide critical ecosystems services vital to the production of numerous crops in the United States’ agricultural sector. However, the U.S. is witnessing a serious decline in the abundance and diversity of domestic and wild pollinators, which threatens U.S. food security. In response, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has created the Pollinator Habitat Initiative (CP-42) to induce landowners to create quality habitat for pollinators by planting beneficial crops and wildflowers on Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)-eligible land. Landowners’ potential conservation decisions under CP-42 and the resulting impact on land use decisions regarding crop production are not well-understood. We examine these issues by designing an economic experiment that simulates landowners’ decisions to enroll in CP-42. As our motivating example, we focus on how CP-42 might affect crop production patterns and the resulting returns in Goshen County, Wyoming. The results indicate that about 16% of CRP-eligible land would be enrolled. Based on the relatively low CP-42 payment, our subjects remove only lower value crops from production. Our results suggest that (1) all dry wheat and sunflower production and a portion of barley, corn, and dry beans could be taken out of production when transferred to pollinator habitat, and (2) that habitat fragmentation would likely occur, which would reduce the efficacy of pollination. Overall, our results suggest that there are significant limits to the overall effectiveness of the CP-42 policy.

This commentary expands upon Eaton et al.’s research note about the challenges of measuring sense of place (SOP). Our body of work includes qualitative and quantitative research that supports their finding that landowners have a strong SOP and conservation ethic about their working lands. However, we deliberate on the importance of considering a broader interpretation of “economic dependence” in the context of SOP, which may include financial and non-financial benefits to the landowner. Eaton et al. report mixed results in its predictive power for conservation decisions on working lands. Yet, several issues negatively impacting economic dependence may override conservation management decisions and explain the “mixed” results reported by the authors. We posit that the definition of economic dependence should include both income and wealth generation as well as landowner amenity rents (defined as the landowner’s internally derived benefits or satisfaction from the amenities on their working lands).