Interest in sustainable agriculture probably had its roots in the concept of sustainable development. There exist no agricultural production technologies or farming systems that are environmentally benign. The question thus becomes "what is sustainable and what is not?" The two underlying themes...

This is a new version of a series of color slides on social capital as presented at a conference on rural development presented in Tampa, Florida in 2004, and sponsored by the Southern Rural Development Center.

The March, 2015 pdf version is recently-edited from a paper written in the late 1980s. A scanned copy of the paper as written in the late 1980s is also available for download. Students who wish to use their math skills to verify each equation and elasticity calculation may wish to download both...

Supplemental class materials links for the Debertin books available through ageconsearch.

n the paper we provide an explanation of the persistence of the commodity titles in US farm bills that is grounded in core theories of the policy process from the political science literature. The political science literature explains policy continuity and policy change from a number of...

The paper provides an overview of the treatment of risk in economics as a way to connect the concept of risk, as used by economists, to the concern of other social science disciplines with how the parallel concepts of vulnerability and resilience affect rural and regional development. These...

This study considers the issue of the transition of new farmers into U.S. agriculture, by examining land ownership and leasing trends. Our approach is to characterize the entire distribution by farmer age and farmer experience rather than using young versus old and beginning versus established...

This staff paper is an electronic version of a journal article, please cite as: Kuethe, T.H., B. Briggeman, N. Paulson, and A.L. Katchova (2014) “A Comparison of Data Collected through Farm Management Associations and the Agricultural Resource Management Survey.” Agricultural Finance Review...

The industrialization of agriculture is associated with tighter supply chains where vertical coordination between farmers and processors is facilitated by the use of agricultural contracts. An overview is provided on the recent trends in the use and structure of agricultural contracts followed...

Most rural regions are weak participants in the modern economy. As a result they are often seen as inherently incapable of sustained economic growth. Yet, OECD evidence shows that there are rural regions with relatively high rates of economic growth. Increasing the number of high performance...