Abstract
Land retirement—the policy of removing land from irrigation—is compared to other drainage management alternatives for areas where shallow ground-water tables contain elevated levels of selenium. These drainage management alternatives, which are being evaluated by the San Joaquin Valley Drainage Program (SJVDP), are: Drainage water treatment, evaporation, dilution, and ground-water pumping. Candidate lands are identified by the ground-water concentration of selenium. The criterion for determining whether to retire a candidate parcel is the minimization of social cost. The value of water made available through retirement for other uses is another important consideration. In several of the cases analyzed, land retirement is the least-cost management alternative.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Stroh, C.M. (1991). Land Retirement as a Strategy for Long-Term Management of Agricultural Drainage and Related Problems. In: Dinar, A., Zilberman, D. (eds) The Economics and Management of Water and Drainage in Agriculture. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4028-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4028-1_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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