substances and accompanying management practices. Helfand and House (1995) cite regulatory strategies that have been implemented in various locations around the country.
Farming choices that represent "best management practices" and reduce erosion and contaminated runoff are rewarded with lowered taxes in several communities around the country, such as in Pepin County, Wisconsin, in the mid-1990s. Elsewhere, in Olmsted County, Minn., farmers have been required to adopt erosion-reducing practices. In Nebraska, agricultural pollution control is embedded in the design of new farm projects (Helfand & House, 1995). The Water Quality Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers to adopt practices that protected farmland from pollution by specific chemical agents, notably nitrogen, phosphorous, and pesticides (Ribaudo, 1998). Yet incentives to farmers have been criticized as economically inefficient because they rely on theories of optimal land and water use that may or may not prove to be valid, not only because they are not always measure
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