Agricultural Land Use, Production, and Water Quality

This chapter introduces topics, concepts, relationships, and tools that are essential to understanding the effects of agriculture on water quality, the significance of these effects, and economic and technological drivers of water pollution from agriculture. The chapter also introduces a systematic watershed-based paradigm for understanding and addressing agriculture and tools used for watershed planning. The chapter begins with a description of the types of water quality problems that result from agricultural production and their economic and ecological significance. The evolution of agriculture as a significant source of water quality problems is connected to economic and technological developments in agricultural production. The chapter turns from causes and consequences to introducing physical processes and relationships at multiple spatial scales, from field to watershed, that must be understood to design effective and efficient solutions. The chapter concludes with the introduction to the watershed-based management and various types of modeling tools used in planning and policy design.