The development of the field-scale Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator (EPIC) model was initiated in 1981 to support assessments of soil erosion impacts on soil productivity for soil, climate, and cropping conditions representative of a broad spectrum of U.S. agricultural production regions....

Rate setting procedures for United States crop yield and revenue insurance contracts employ methods that presume correlations to be state invariant. Whether this is true matters. If yield-yield correlations strengthen when crops are subject to widespread stress, then diversification...

In recent years, the organic sector has grown steadily and significantly. However, little economic research has been performed on risk management in organic agriculture, likely because of the lack of available data. This lack of data may also be why the creation of the current crop insurance...

The modeling of price risk in the theory and practice of commodity risk management has been developed far beyond that of crop yield risk. This is in large part due to the use of plausible stochastic price processes. We use the Pólya urn to identify and develop a model of the crop yield...

This study investigates the implications of treating different environmental benefits as the primary target of policy design. We focus on two scenarios, estimating for both of them in-stream sediment, nutrient loadings, and carbon sequestration. In the first, we assess the impact of a program...

We evaluate the impact of climate change on stream flow in the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB) by using a regional climate model (RCM) coupled with a hydrologic model, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The SWAT model was calibrated and validated against measured stream flow data...

The effectiveness of conservation practices depends on their placement on the fields within the watershed. Cost-effective placement of these practices for maximum water quality benefits on each field requires comparing a very large number of possible land-use scenarios. To address this problem,...

This paper describes the application of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to the Maquoketa River watershed, located in northeast Iowa. The inputs to the model were obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency's geographic information/database system called Better Assessment...

The Raccoon River Watershed (RRW) in West-Central Iowa has been recognized as exporting some of the highest nitrate-nitrogen loadings in the United States and is a major source of sediment and other nutrient loadings. An integrated modeling framework has been constructed for the RRW that...

The size, scale, and number of subwatersheds can affect a watershed modeling process and subsequent results. The objective of this study was to determine the appropriate level of subwatershed division for simulating sediment yield. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model with a...