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Abstract
We argue that to support agriculture–environmental policy decision making, stakeholders
need ‘quantitative back-of-the-envelope’ analysis that is timely and sufficiently
accurate to make informed decisions. We apply this concept to the analysis of the supply
of ecosystem services from agriculture. We present a spatially explicit production
model and show how it can be used to derive the supply of ecosystem services in a
region. This model shows that the supply of ecosystem services can be derived from
the spatial distribution of opportunity cost of providing those services. We then show
how this conceptual model can be used to develop a minimum-data (MD) approach
to the analysis of the supply of ecosystem services from agriculture that can be implemented
with the kinds of secondary data that are available in most parts of the world.
We apply the MD approach to simulate the supply of carbon that could be sequestered
in agricultural soils in the dryland grain-producing region of Montana. We find
that the supply curve derived from the MD approach can approximate the supply
curve obtained from a more elaborate model based on site-specific data, and can do
so with sufficient accuracy for policy analysis.