Avoiding Fields on Fire: Information Dissemination Policies for Environmentally Safe Crop-Residue Management

Agricultural open burning, that is, the practice of burning crop residue in harvested fields to prepare land for sowing a new crop, is well recognized as a significant contributor to CO 2 and black-carbon emissions, and long-term climate change. Low-soil-tillage practices using an agricultural machine called the Happy Seeder, which can sow the new seed without removing the previous crop residue, have emerged as the most effective alternative to open burning. However, given the limited supply of Happy Seeders from the government, and the fact that farmers incur a significant yield loss if they delay sowing the new crop, farmers are often unwilling to wait to be processed by the Happy Seeder and, instead, burn their crop residue. We study how the government can use effective information-disclosure policies in the operation of Happy Seeders to minimize open burning. A Happy Seeder is assigned to process a group of farms. The government knows, but does not necessarily disclose, the Happy Seeder’s schedule at the start of the sowing season. We propose a class of information-disclosure policies, called dilatory policies, that provide no information to the farmers about the schedule until a prespecified switch period and then reveal the entire schedule afterward. We show that an optimal dilatory policy can significantly lower the number of farms burnt compared with that under the full-disclosure and the no-disclosure policies. Using data from the rice-wheat crop system in northwestern India, we demonstrate that the optimal dilatory policy can reduce CO 2 and black-carbon emissions by 17% on average. We also examine the impact of the government’s policy on the trade-off between environmental damage and farmers’ welfare. This paper was accepted by Jayashankar Swaminathan, operations management. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.03030 .