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Abstract
This paper relies on data associated 2,100 agricultural land sale transactions across two
major Nebraska Watersheds (the Republican and Central Platte) over the 2000 to 2008
time period. The sales were spatially referenced (digitized into a GIS) in order to quantify
and geo-spatially predict and map the implicit values of irrigation through the use of
hedonic price modeling. Marginal implicit prices vary substantially across subwatersheds
(natural resource districts), and the contribution of irrigation to sale prices is
directly related to the extent to dependency of production agriculture on irrigation.
This information is now currently being used to evaluate the economic efficiency of
recent irrigation retirement programs and to help ensure that current and future retirement
programs are cost-effective through targeting that retires irrigation land with the greatest
hydrologic impact on water resources for the lowest cost.