| The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is instrumental in reshaping rural landscapes, affecting the resources that flow through them, and in creating more sustainable agricultural landscapes as contracts expire on over 36.5 million acres. The Cache River watershed of southernmost Illinois is used as a case study for discovering land use intentions upon contract expiration, landowner willingness to enroll eligible land into the filter strip component of the CRP, and arguing for a landscape approach to managing environmental resources. Mail survey questionnaire data and logistic regression techniques are used to create a matrix of probabilities that landowners will revert to crop production upon contract expiration. Possible combinations of CRP rental rate offering and prevailing commodity prices include actual conditions during the 15 th signup in March, 1997. This snapshot in time offers crop prices at 115% of ten-year averages and a USDA rental rate offer approximating 108% ({dollar}65.00/acre/year) of previous contract rates. Logit models predict an I I% probability that farmers will eschew reenrollment and revert to a crop production land use given this decision environment. A somewhat higher percentage of the total CRP acreage in transition will be affected. Another logit model is constructed to identify the factors that differentiate respondents who are willing to enroll eligible acres in filter strips from those who are not. The filter strip model correctly predicts 83% of responses and indicates that simply informing farmland owners of the eligibility of their streamside lands for the CRP has the potential to increase filter strip enrollment. A third model predicts very low probabilites for enrolling expiring CRP land into long-term conservation easements regardless of contract length or type. Spatial analysis is conducted on a subset of the larger Cache River watershed, Big Creek and adjacent Cypress Creek, and enabled by a GIS. Logit models reflecting possible policy scenarios are linked to a GIS to generate respective land use outcomes whose spatial patterns are input to the AGNPS model. Model output is in the form of sediment yield and reveals a direct response to land returning to crop production and reflects the fact that Big and Cypress Creeks are essentially headwaters to the larger Cache River. A methodology for predicting future landscapes is developed and tested here. Thus, this research offers interactive and spatially explicit models that allow all stakeholders to view likely water quality outcomes of different landscape patterns resulting from various policy scenarios awaiting private landowners. |
