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Phosphorous tax may be one way to cut it out of waterways
 


By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Agricultural, Environment and Development Economics can’t find evidence the conservation practices being used have reduced total phosphorous in waterways.
Instead, Brent Sohngen proposes an economic response: A 25 percent tax on phosphorous.
Dr. James Shortle, distinguished professor of agricultural and environmental economics at Pennsylvania State University, proposed spatial targeting as a way to make the most of dollars being spent to reduce phosphorous in waterways. Sohngen and Shortle  discussed these ideas at a recent webinar presented by OSU.
Using data from the National Center for Water Quality at Heidelberg University, analyzed from the 1970s to the present, Sohngen said researchers couldn’t detect any effect on water quality from the money spent on encouraging farmers to adopt conservation and no-till practices.
“They’ve reduced attached (to the soil) phosphorous, but we can’t find any evidence that the total phosphorous has gone down at all,” said Sohngen.
He has noticed a significant relationship between the price of and concentration of phosphorous. When the price goes up, the concentration in the water goes down, he said. The difference is more significant with soluble phosphorous, which is more closely related to recent applications of phosphorous, than it is to attached phosphorous, which is related more to the past years of applications.
Imposing a 25 percent tax on phosphorous could reduce soluble phosphorous concentrations in the watershed by about 8 percent, Sohngen estimated. “I don’t want to suggest that a tax on phosphorous would solve everything,” he said. “There’s no silver bullet, and the issues are complex.
“If we actually want to solve this, it is going to cost us a lot of money. While a tax is one way to do it, another way is just to subsidize farmers and say we’ll give you $100 (this is just an example amount) not to put phosphorous on your field.”
Another interesting result Sohngen found is there has been a reduction in phosphorous concentrations in the summertime over the last two decades. While researchers are still trying to identify why that is, one possibility is the increase in corn yields.
“Corn is the big phosphorous user … if we can subsidize farmers not to apply phosphorous, but at the same time to plant more corn and take that yield risk, then I think we would probably start to remove that phosphorous far faster than we have been,” he said.
Shortle said conservation practices where he works, in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, are still important.
“I think the thing that I wanted to highlight in my presentation was the importance of thinking about, how do you get the biggest bang for the buck from the money that is spent on conservation practices or water pollution control?” he said.
Cost-sharing subsidies are the most common way to address agricultural nonpoint  pollution, but those resources are becoming scarce, Shortle said. These programs are also voluntary and the farmers who apply for the subsidy may not be causing that much of an environmental problem.
In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, six states and the District of Columbia had to develop Watershed Implementation Plans (WIP) to achieve their requirement under the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL). A TMDL is the scientific determination of the maximum amount of a given pollutant a surface water can absorb and still meet water quality standards that protect human health and aquatic life.
In research he did for the USDA, Shortle looked at WIPs to determine if the required pollution reductions could be achieved at a lower cost. He found by carefully targeting where they placed practices and by selecting practices cost-effectively, these states could save about 60 percent of the cost overall – for some states, up to 80 percent of the cost of the WIPs.
“Spend your resources where they can make the biggest impact,” Shortle said. “A popular thing in this section is stream bank fencing because we have very intensive agriculture; animals in the stream are problematic. In the work that we have done for this USDA project, we found that stream bank fencing is not a very cost-effective practice. A number of practices have a larger impact for a lower cost and would be a better way to spend money.”
10/23/2014