Stakeholder-informed environmental-economic tradeoffs at the farm and forest scale

Agriculture and silviculture are economically and culturally important across broad regions of the world that rely on groundwater resources. However, these practices consume water and can be sources of nonpoint source pollution, affecting water quantity and quality in aquifers and associated ecosystems. Specific management practices (MP) applied at the farm- and forest-scale substantially influence aquifer recharge and nitrate leaching and have the potential to reduce environmental impacts. However, MP implementation is often associated with high producer costs, potentially reducing their economic viability. Rigorously quantifying the environmental and economic tradeoffs of MP implementation is thus critical for developing policies to support and incentivize their adoption. In this study, we engaged with a broad community of stakeholders in a participatory modeling process to develop a coupled biophysical-economic modeling platform and used it to assess a range of MP for corn, peanut, carrot, hay, pasture-raised cattle, and plantation pine in the Floridan Aquifer region of the southeastern United States, focused here on Florida. We used a coupled Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT)-MODFLOW model to simulate groundwater recharge, nitrate leaching, and crop/forest yields. Economic analyses used enterprise budgets informed by SWAT yield outputs to compute net producer returns, and results were compared within a three-dimensional tradeoff space (aquifer recharge-nitrate load-net financial returns). Results indicated clear synergies and tradeoffs among production systems, with row crops having the highest economic benefit and largest environmental impacts, while pine and forage production systems had smaller economic benefits but lower environmental impacts. Importantly, improved MP dramatically reduced environmental impacts while in some cases achieving higher net returns. These observations suggest that improved MP can improve both the environmental and economic sustainability of agricultural and silvicultural production in the Floridan Aquifer region, a finding with relevance for similar agricultural regions globally.