Intensive agricultural production in most parts of the world especially in the more developed countries continues to mount pressure on water resources thereby threatening the quality of life in the aquatic ecosystems. With stringent standards such as those stipulated in the European Union Water Framework Directive (EU WFD), introduced to address the water quality problem the situation calls for solutions that would reconcile these two conflicting issues. “End-of-pipe” filter technologies that would disconnect agricultural drainage pathway before it gets to the aquatic environment have been proposed as appropriate solutions to this problem in the Danish context. The feasibility of these technologies with regards to their cost-effectiveness in nutrient mitigation, farmers’ adoption behavior, and environmental policy implementation is assessed in this thesis.

The thesis comprises of four papers based on survey and case-farms data and utilizes a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate:
i) the farmers’ perception of water quality and their adoption behavior with respect to voluntary nutrient reduction technologies,
ii) the farmers willingness to adopt constructed wetland technologies, and their willingness and extent of trading-off the existing farm management nutrient reduction measures with constructed wetland technology,
iii) the cost-effectiveness of surface flow constructed wetlands, and
iv) the strategies of incorporating the filter technologies into policy measures.
Overall, the findings in this thesis indicate a potential for integration of the filter technologies into nutrient reduction measures.