Potential economic impacts of groundwater conservation in the Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer (MRAA), Louisiana, USA

Abstract

Overextraction of groundwater reduces groundwater height, increases the energy cost, and may threaten an aquifer's economic life. Water-intensive crops, corn, and soybean, dominate the agricultural land in the Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer (MRAA) region of the United States, thus stressing this confined aquifer.Groundwater conservation policy or the adoption of efficient irrigation technology could save both water and energy. This study aims to estimate the future returns from the irrigated land under the scenarios of 30%, 20%, 10%, 5%, and no groundwater conservation from 2020 to 2022. An accurate model to predict the crop choice decision is important to estimate the impact of groundwater policies. We develop a crop choice model where an individual farmer has a crop planting or land fallowing choice each year. We use the random forest, boosted regression trees, and support vector machine for the crop choice prediction. Boosted regression trees perform the best in our classification problem with 75.5% out of sample accuracy. The prediction model shows that the numbers of corn growers increase in the future. Our results show that the profit This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.