Agricultural Production and Pollutant Runoffs in Québec’s Chaudière River Watershed : What Are the Potential Environmental Gains?

Despite imposition of strict environmental standards in Quebec, the impact of agricultural activities on water quality remains a concern, particularly in the Chaudière-Appalaches region.This region’s intensive animal and plant productions lead to excess phosphorus, nitrogen and sediments.This paper analyzes the environmental efficiency of agricultural producers in the Chaudière river watershed, located south of Quebec City. We adopt a stochastic approach applied to parametric distance functions to data collected from 210 farms. Results show that, on average, crop producers are more efficient than livestock producers. In terms of emissions of phosphorus and nitrogen, the environmental efficiencies of producers are similar, at 0.804 and 0.820 respectively.For sediment runoff, however, the environmental efficiencies are lower on average, at 0736. Overall, the agricultural producers from this watershed could have achieved productivity gains in excess of 20%, while simultaneously reducing their emissions of pollutants