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...

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...

Agricultural data systems remain based upon now obsolete concepts. In particular, the "full-time, family farm" is still organizing concepts for much of the farm data system, and for agricultural policies. Yet farming has clearly bifurcated into: a relatively small number of large farms that...

After discussing basic principles of school finance, and comparing selected education-related variables in southeastern states, this paper examines how schools districts are financed in Kentucky. Emphasis is given to issues of funding adequacy, efficiency and equity, and the lawsuit culminating...

I taught AEC 620, Advanced Production Economics, every year between 1974, when I arrived as an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky, to 2012, when I retired. The following publication is one of the early sets of class notes I used in the course, dating from 1978 set up as an early...

It is widely believed that public and private research and educational activities have led to rapid advances in the production of crops and livestock, making farmers far better off than they would have been had these technological advances not taken place. The cash receipts data for the postwar...

Farmland values have increased rapidly over the last decade in response to high incomes for crop farmers and inordinately low interest rates. Farmers have responded to these conditions by bidding up the price of good cropland. In addition, the long period of increasing land values, since the...

This paper investigates some applications of high-resolution, three­ dimensional PC-based computer graphics to research and education in agricultural production economics. Examples illustrate issues in the identification of stages of production for the multifactor case; special cases in which...

This paper pushes beyond past efforts in employing computer graphics in a number of ways. In this paper, the capabilities of the SAS for drawing surfaces and contours of three-dimensional functional forms are combined with the drawing, annotation and sequential animation features of Harvard...

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...