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...

Can a single program support farm income and encourage producers to adopt environmentally sound farming practices? While simple in concept, attempting to roll the farm income support features of existing commodity programs and conservation payments into a single program raises questions. Exactly...

Since the passage of the 1996 Farm Act, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) has provided over $10 billion in technology adoption subsidies. One of the national conservation priorities in EQIP is water conservation, but it is not known how participation in EQIP by irrigators...

The literature on climate change and crop yields recognizes the need to allow for highly non-linear marginal effects. This study combines these two areas of the literature by using Flexible Fourier Transforms (FFT’s) to ensure flexibility for both the time trend and the weather effects. This...

We investigate what farmland preservation programs reveal about the importance of protecting different rural amenities. An extensive content analysis of the enabling legislation of various farmland protection programs suggests wide variation exists in the protection of amenities. An analysis of...

Many studies have examined the effects of land use regulations on land prices and urban spatial form. Increasingly, jurisdictions have adopted incentive based mechanisms, such as purchase of development rights (PDR) programs, to manage the pace and pattern of urban growth and the conversion of...

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...

This paper examines whether permanent farmland preservation programs are capitalized into farmland prices. We consider the landowner's decision to voluntarily participate and correct for sample selection bias in our estimation of sales prices. Initial results suggest development restrictions...

Public amenities provided by a rural agricultural landscape, arising from open space and farm activity, are important to many citizens and policymakers. Widespread development of farmland in some parts of the country has spawned an expanding array of farmland protection programs by county,...