The research surveyed 144 farmers in two English catchments using a structured questionnaire comprising of two choice experiments. The Eden catchment is a predominantly livestock catchment whereas the Wensum catchment is a predominantly arable. The farmer survey: 1) determine the 'hidden transaction costs' of spatially targeted diffuse pollution policies; 2) investigates the use of novel economic incentives that encourage spatial coordination of pollution abatement effort and increase farmland biodiversity between neighbouring farms; 3) assess the feasibility of spatial targeted risk based tradable land retirement scheme to reduce agricultural diffuse pollution; and 4) determines farmer’s perception of 5-6 catchment specific diffuse pollution mitigation measures and their perceived costs and benefits. This interdisciplinary research investigates novel cost-effective approaches to controlling diffuse water pollution (DP) from agriculture. It involves using recent advances in surveillance science and risk profiling that permit identifying land, which is more likely to contribute to pollution. The aim is to quantify the economic and environmental benefits of using spatially targeted regulation on high-risk land i.e. pollution prone and hydrologically connected to rivers. Thus farmers will mainly take control measures, and regulators will mostly inspect practices, on targeted high-risk land. The research models and quantifies the benefit to farmers and regulators from adopting a micro-targeted approach to multi-pollutant DP regulation using Bio-physical Economic Modelling of two English catchments. The study: 1) investigates the transferability of policy recommendations across catchments making them more broadly applicable, 2) determines the 'hidden transaction costs' of policies through structured surveys of farmers, 3) investigates the use of novel economic incentives that encourage spatial coordination of abatement effort, 4) analyses the trade-off between various agricultural externalities (pollution swapping) and, 5) investigates spatial targeting land retirement to increase farmland biodiversity. This spatially targeted approach should reduce the cost of complying with environmental standards - thus benefiting regulators, farmers and the environment.

72 farmers were selected at random from a list of farmers in the agricultural census data. Face-to-face interviews were conducted by representatives of the farm business survey teams from the University of Newcastle and Cambridge University. The survey was piloted using a sample of 12 farmers and revised.