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...

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...

Given that approximately half of all U.S. farmland is leased, absentee (non-operator) landowners have a significant role in agriculture. Because decisions about how to use farmland can be affected by ownership status, tenure can have far reaching implications for the production of food and...

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...

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...

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...

Per-unit costs for conservation investments in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) are determined by market prices for conservation practices and payment cost-share rates. This study examines the relative importance of these factors in determining the size of the most common...