Data for Farmland Preservation Study

This study fills a gap in cultural ecosystem service (CES) assessment of prime farmland located in peri-urban areas by presenting results from a choice experiment recently conducted in Utah’s Wasatch Front region. The choice experiment was designed to account for heterogeneous effects associated with a wide array of socio-demographic and attitudinal characteristics on household preferences for farmland preservation, including farmland used for the joint production of solar power and agricultural products. We apply a mixed-logit model to our data that controls for preference heterogeneity among Wasatch Front households along two dimensions – at the individual household level and according to different household types. We find that the typical household is willing to pay a non-trivial annual fee to preserve the region’s existing peri-urban farmland, and to a lesser extent is willing to pay for agrivoltaics on that land. We also find extensive preference heterogeneity among different types of households for farmland preservation and agrivoltaics. These findings can serve as crucial components of broader land-use studies designed to account for the full range of agri-environmental ecosystem services.