Economic Aspects of Crop Pest Management and Monarch Conservation

Abstract

The dramatic rise in prophylactic chemical treatments for pest and weed control in the past two decades have raised many environmental concerns. Although cost effective, such treatments which include neonicotinoids and herbicide tolerant (HT) crops contaminate soil and water and cause wildlife habitat loss. In my thesis, I explore the economics of eco-friendly practices of the farmers ranging from bio-diversity conservation to adapting integrated pest management. In the first chapter, I survey Midwestern farmers to estimate their willingness to grow milkweed on their non-cropland for Monarch butterfly conservation for various remuneration rates. I also approximate intrinsic motivation of farmers from their actual conservation data using reverse regression, distance discriminant analysis and control functions to test for motivation crowding out. Findings indicate motivation crowding out at modest levels of compensation. Alternatively, high remuneration crowds in farmers motivation to conserve Monarchs. The second chapter estimate soybean farmers' value of information provided by alternative configurations of a monitoring network for soybean rust (Phakopsora pachyrhizi). It shows that a network of 400 sentinel plots can maximize the expected profit of soybean farmers provided more plots are placed in the Corn Belt where the risk of soybean rust infection is lower, but where much more soybean is produced in contrast to the current spatial arrangement where sentinel plots are disproportionately placed in the Southern US. The last chapter examines the economic suitability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for scouting soybean aphids (Aphis glycines Matsumura) based on a plant-level spatiotemporal bioeconomic model of infestation. Findings indicate that the optimal profit from UAV based scouting is equivalent to that from manual scouting. But its greater tendency to detect false positives can also trigger frequent unnecessary treatments and dramatically reduce farmers' profits. Yet, UAV's commercial viability depends more on reducing its operating cost than improving its precision, once it has a tally threshold of 250 soybean aphids per plant.