The relative importance of herbicide use for conservation tillage adoption by U.S. corn and soybean producers

Herbicide use is widespread in agricultural production to control weeds prior to and after planting and to "burndown" weeds in the spring for conservation tillage. Whether conservation tillage adoption leads to higher herbicide usage has been a question of policy relevance for decades in the United States. Older U.S. studies using standard statistical and economic techniques have not consistently demonstrated higher herbicide usage levels among producers practicing conservation tillage, but these studies did not fully account for other practices, economic, or agronomic factors. To provide a more timely and comprehensive understanding of the importance of herbicides to conservation tillage, this study achieves two objectives with the most recent, nationally representative data from the US Department of Agriculture. First, it describes trends and compares conservation tillage and herbicide usage among field corn and soybean producers, similar to previous studies using standard economic techniques. Second, a Classification and Regression Tree (CART) model is employed-a novel methodology relative to previous studies that offers distinct advantages over traditional regression modeling-to evaluate the importance of herbicide use for conservation tillage adoption while accounting for other factors. Pairwise mean comparisons for field corn and soybeans indicated that herbicide usage pre-emergence was significantly higher with conservation tillage, but there was no consistent, significant differences in herbicide usage post-emergence. The CART analysis (with prediction accuracy ranging from 68-72%) also showed that pre-emergent use of glyphosate was the strongest predictor (with predicted probabilities from 0.83-0.86) of conservation tillage for field corn in 2016 and soybeans in 2018. Other factors such as the use of crop rotations, highly erodible land, region, and farm size were also strong predictors of conservation tillage. These findings highlight the importance and complexity of herbicide use in the adoption of conservation tillage for U.S. field corn and soybeans.