Title:

Farmer trade-offs between pest control and pollinator health: Evidence from a choice experiment with Midwestern Cucurbit Farmers

Many insecticides, especially neonicotinoids, have detrimental effects on pollinating insects, both wild and managed, which are essential in providing pollination services to pollinator-dependent crops. Farmers of such crops, therefore, face a trade-off between pest control and pollination. In this paper, we assess farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for integrated pest and pollinator management programs that vary the extent to which they mitigate this tradeoff. We conduct a choice experiment survey among cucurbit farmers in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The choice experiment had five attributes - pest control effectiveness, wild pollinator population size, pesticide leaching, the strength of the managed pollinators’ hive, and costs. Preliminary results suggest that cucurbit farmers in this sample, might not be willing to mitigate this tradeoff in their pest and pollinator management decisions: their preferences over pest and pollinator management options are solely driven by pest control effectiveness and not by pollinator health. These results contribute to the pollinator health policy debate by providing the first evidence that even growers of pollinator-dependent crops might not be willing to mitigate the negative effect of insecticides on pollinators.

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