Farmers' Demand for Water Management Information

Abstract

This research extends the Feder and Slade (1984) model of information acquisition by assuming information has both monetary and time costs. Farmers may substitute between different types of information given differences in these two costs. This generalized model is used to develop hypotheses about factors affecting farmers’ demand for water management information. These hypotheses are then tested using a special tabulation of the USDA Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey provided by USDA’s Economic Research Service. The cross tab data on sources of information used to conserve water and reduce irrigation costs and methods to schedule irrigation are stratified by farm size, year and state for 17 Western States. Main results are as follows. The total number of information sources to manage water and irrigation scheduling methods increases with farm size and decreases with the proportion of farmers over 65. While measures of drought did not have a significant effect on information demand, a history of wetter than normal years discouraged information demand. Water costs do not affect the number of information sources or scheduling methods used, but do affect choice among different methods. Higher water costs encouraged greater use of more management intensive methods. The total number of information sources used was decreasing in the proportion of farmers who were Hispanic. This comes from less use of private, but not public, information sources.