The recent 9-billion-gallon increase in corn-based ethanol production, which resulted from a combination of rising gasoline prices and a suite of Federal bioenergy policies, provides evidence of how farmers altered their land-use decisions in response to increased demand for corn. As some...

Selected Paper prepared for presentation at the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association's 2012 AAEA Annual Meeting, Seattle, Washington, August 12-14, 2012. This research was supported by a cooperative agreement with U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Economic Research Service. We thank...

Beginning, limited-resource, and socially disadvantaged farmers make up as much as 40 percent of all U.S. farms. Some Federal conservation programs contain provisions that encourage participation by such “targeted” farmers and the 2008 Farm Act furthered these efforts. This report compares...

The Environmental Benefits Index (EBI) ranks Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) offers by weighing program costs for enrolling land in CRP against six environmental objectives. This paper uses Monte Carlo simulations to analyze the sensitivity of CRP enrollment outcome to the specification of...