Agricultural Water Demands

The purpose of this chapter is to present and discuss the major lines of research related to water use at the farm-level. In contrast to the case of industrial water use, there has been an enormous amount of attention paid to the economic characteristics of agricultural water use and effluent flows from agricultural operations. In addition to the primary literature concerned with modeling agricultural water demands, there are also a number of surveys (Carruthers and Clark, 1981; Caswell, 1991; Just, 1991; Boggess, Lacewell and Zilberman, 1993; Zilberman and Lipper, 1999). Furthermore, there are journals devoted to the topic (Advances in Irrigation, Agricultural Water Management) and other journals such as American Journal of Agricultural Economics and Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics that devote a significant amount of space to it.