U.S. farmers and ranchers produce a wide variety of commodities for food, fuel, and fiber in response to market signals. Farms also contain significant amounts of natural resources that can provide a host of environmental services, including cleaner air and water, flood control, and improved...

USDA spends over $5 billion per year on conservation activities, mostly through voluntary programs that pay farmers and landowners to provide environmental services. USDA can reduce expenditures and encourage landowners to provide greater environmental services by making use of available data....

In this chapter we took a broad look at American participation in on-farm recreation. While further analysis is in order, it does seem that visiting farms, either as a primary purpose of a trip or as part of a rural sightseeing outing, is a popular activity. We estimate that over 60 million...

Farmers in the United States produce a wide variety of commodities for food and fiber. Farmers can also produce a variety of non-commodity ecosystem services for which markets do not exist or are imperfectly formed. Such services may be valued by society, but due to their nature or institutional...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture spends over $5 billion per year on conservation programs, mostly on voluntary programs that give financial assistance to farmers and landowners to provide environmental services (such as implementing nutrient management programs or planting native grasses)....

This report estimates the impact that high levels of enrollment in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) have had on economic trends in rural counties since the program's inception in 1985 until today. The results of a growth model and quasi-experimental control group analysis indicate no...