What Drives the Adoption of Clean Agricultural Technologies? An Ex Ante Assessment of Sustainable Biofuel Production in Southwestern Wisconsin
2017
Mooney, Daniel F. | Barham, Bradford L.
This paper explores the farmer’s general decision to adopt a clean agricultural productiontechnology and the particular role of pro-social behavior. We hypothesize that pro-socialbehavior may influence farmers’ individual valuation of clean technologies through twochannels, their beliefs about the technology’s public benefits and their preferences forenvironmental quality. A linear characteristics model is developed to illustrate how a pro-socialpreference structure may lead to different adoption outcomes as compared to the standard profitmaximizationframework. We test this possibility using mail survey data on ex ante bioenergycrop adoption in southwestern Wisconsin. The contingent valuation empirical strategy estimatesfarmers’ distribution of willingness-to-accept values (i.e., minimum biomass reservation prices)as a function of expected pro-social behavior, factors that constrain short-run technologicalchange, and other standard adoption influences. We find that the observed heterogeneity in WTAvalues is partially and significantly explained by expected pro-social behavior.
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