Asymmetric Willingness-to-Pay Distributions for Livestock Manure

Abstract

The Environmental Protection Agency's new Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) regulations are forcing some farms to export livestock manure to off-farm acres. The regulation compliance cost depends on the willingness of neighboring crop producers to accept or pay for the manure. This study estimates a manure willingness-to-pay distribution for crop producers using a contingent valuation mail survey. A flexible parametric distribution is borrowed from the crop yield literature, which shows that manure willingness to pay is left-skewed. Most crop producers in our sample will pay a positive price close to the savings in commercial fertilizer, but approximately 25% require a payment before accepting manure.

Keywords

• animal waste
• asymmetric distribution
• contingent valuation
• manure
• nonmarket valuation
• pollution
• willingness to pay