Important linkages between farm management variables, soil loss, crop yields, and incentives to practice soil conservation have often been omitted from previous empirical studies, due to regional data limitations and incomplete knowledge of soil loss/crop yiled relationships. An optimal control model is developed with explicit attention to interactions between management choices, soil loss, and long-term farmland productivity. Analysis of the optimality conditions generates a number of hypotheses related to farmers' productivity-linked conservation incentives, which can be tested empirically without precise knowledge of specific erosion-productivity relationships.