Conservation enrollment as farm risk management: Robust decisions under market uncertainty on Illinois working landscapes

Agricultural landscapes face two pressures: market volatility and unmet climate and biodiversity targets. Existing conservation programs are not designed to handle both at once, and meeting those targets requires conservation on agricultural land. Programs are still designed for predicted futures rather than the full distribution of plausible ones. This leaves farmers exposed to median opportunity cost of $1449/acre (1 acre ≈ 0.4047 ha) over 15 years when long-term commitments prove wrong. This study takes the standpoint of farmers, who can choose to convert private agricultural land to conservation, and asks how the enrollment decision responds to different policy settings under deep market uncertainty. Across 100 Illinois counties, a two-phase framework first decides how much land each county retires based on income, then tests that decision against 15-year price paths using Monte Carlo simulation. We evaluate Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and carbon-market payments as levers that shift the farmer’s decision, across 72 policy scenarios and 5000 simulations per county-scenario, subject to USDA’s 25% county retirement cap. Combined CRP and carbon mechanisms consistently outperform single-mechanism approaches, retiring an average of 3.2 million acres with $0.8 billion in income gains. Enrollment (ENROLL) decisions prove correct in 90.1% of simulated futures, versus 22.5% for continued-farming (FARM) decisions, a four-fold advantage driven by mechanism redundancy rather than price prediction. Carbon and biodiversity gains follow as coupled co-benefits of the resulting land-use change, reaching 4.33 megatonnes of CO₂e sequestered annually. County-average success rates range from 54.2% to 64.5%. These findings reframe conservation enrollment from environmental sacrifice into land risk management.