Value of Soil Erosion to the Land Owner File A1-75

The amount of soil erosion has decreased in the United States and Iowa, but soil erosion still remains a serious problem, especially for some soils. In 1982 there was an estimated 7.4 tons per acre of soil erosion on Iowa cropland. By 2007 erosion in Iowa had decreased to 5.1 tons per acre. For the entire United States, erosion rates dropped from 4.0 tons to 2.7 tons per cropland acre over the same time period. (USDA/NRCS, 2) Erosion represents costs to the farmers. These costs include lost fertilizer and soil carbon. Erosion also produces costs to society. These costs include clogged roadway ditches, increased turbidity in the water damaging fi sh and increasing the need for fi l-tration, and displaced soil in the water that increases siltation of water control structures. These societal costs are borne by taxpayers or society in general. They are ‘external ’ to the decisions made by the farmer. There is a third category of costs not usually con-sidered in a discussion of soil erosion. These are the costs to the land owners caused by a decrease in land value. Land owners may be the farmer, but increas-ingly they are not. In 2007 over half the farmland in Iowa was rented. In the United States, 38 percent of the farmland was rented. This paper estimates the costs of erosion to the land owner. The focus is on Iowa soils. Farmer and Societal Cost There have been several studies estimating the costs of soil erosion in the United States. These studies have examined the costs to the individual farmer, the costs to society or both. Tegtmeier and Duffy esti-mated the external costs of agricultural production in the United States (primarily erosion related) to range from $14.09 to $45.68 in 2002 dollars. (Tegtmeier and Duffy) The USDA has undertaken a number of different studies to estimate the costs of erosion. The major-ity of these studies were conducted as part of an estimate of the benefi ts from different conservation programs required by U.S. farm policy. The USDA/ NRCS has done two benefi t/cost analyses of th