Picking up the PACE: a multi-state empirical analysis of payments for agricultural conservation easement (PACE) program performance

Abstract The United States has implemented a variety of policy mechanisms to protect agricultural lands, and individual states have invested $5.5 billion in this protection; however, the conversion of prime farmland to development continues. Is farmland protection policy effective in maintaining viable agricultural landscapes? In this study, we developed a suite of indicators to measure the performance of state-funded agricultural conservation easement programs including a) land quality, b) cost, c) development risk, d) proportion of a state’s agricultural land protected, and e) contiguity of protected land. We then compared these indicators across 11 states and among three different easement program designs using regression analysis and landscape metrics. We found that state-funded easement programs do not necessarily perform better than easements that were not acquired with public funds. Furthermore, we found that program design may be an important factor when measuring program performance. We categorized these programs by the degree of centralized decision-making and found that decentralized programs protect lands with at least three times higher quality, that are almost twice as valuable, and with at least 1.5 times greater development risk than centralized and collaborative programs. At the landscape level, easements in states with decentralized programs have at least 1.3 times greater contiguity compared to centralized and collaborative programs though they were also associated with the lowest proportion of the state’s agricultural land base under protection at 0.8%. Overall, our analysis revealed that irrespective of program design, there may be trade-offs between the quantity, quality, and cost of the lands protected. Further research is needed to fully investigate how farmland protection policies in general, and program design specifically, affect society’s ability to maintain a viable agricultural land base.