Incorporating drainage discharge into the trade-off between economic maize gains and nitrogen leaching loss using farmers’ utility function

Authors: TIRGARI, MOHAMMAD - Michigan State University; NEJADHASHEMI, A - Michigan State University; Harmel, Robert

Submitted to: Agricultural Water Management
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/20/2026
Publication Date: 8/22/2026
Citation: Tirgari, M., Nejadhashemi, A.P., Harmel, R.D. 2026. Incorporating drainage discharge into the trade-off between economic maize gains and nitrogen leaching loss using farmers’ utility function. Agricultural Water Management. 334. Article 110719. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2026.110719.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2026.110719

Interpretive Summary: The difficulty of maintaining food production within the planet’s safe operating space has increased the need for dynamic decision-making to assess the human welfare impacts of less environmentally impactful diets (LEID-based strategies). Achieving LEID targets requires a precise prediction tool utility function that captures farmers’ preferences and decision dynamics. A novel prediction tool is introduced, expanding the LEID criterion to model the evolving interplay between crop yields and environmental trade-offs. Experimental data on corn yield, nitrogen leaching, and drainage discharge depth (volume) from 421 site years of data from corn production fields across the U.S. and Canada are analyzed empirically. The results show that the marginal utilities of corn yield and nitrogen leaching reflect structured trade-off behaviors. The tool enhances our current ability to analyze and predict farmers’ dynamic decision-making behavior.

Technical Abstract: The paradigm of maintaining food production within the planet’s safe operating space has increased the need for dynamic decision-making to assess the welfare impacts of less environmentally impactful diets (LEID-based strategies). Achieving LEID targets requires a precise utility function that captures farmers’ preferences and decision dynamics. A novel utility function is introduced, expanding the LEID criterion through trigonometric rules to model the evolving interplay between crop yields and environmental trade-offs. Experimental data on corn yield, nitrogen leaching, and drainage discharge depth (volume) from 421 site years of data from corn production fields across the U.S. and Canada are analyzed empirically. The results show that the marginal utilities of corn yield and nitrogen leaching reflect structured trade-off behaviors. The function’s inherent dynamism, embedded in its saddle surface topology, enhances its analytical power by overcoming the limitations of conventional models related to static-dynamic trade-offs and nonlinearity. This structural property theoretically enhances the utility function’s adaptability to farmers’ dynamic decision-making behavior.