On average, 2.2 million acres of farmland per year were converted to urban uses between 1992 and 2001. Every State has enacted measures that help protect farmland, but most measures do not preserve farmland permanently. Purchase of Development Rights (PDR) programs, is increasingly popular....

Hunting is a recreation activity that mostly occurs on private land, where the right to hunt is controlled by landowners. Access to private land for hunting is becoming more limited, helping to explain recent declines in hunting participation rates. To explore this issue, ERS recently examined...

Biological resources refer to the living landscape — the plants, animals, and other aspects of nature — and are important to society for the various services they provide, as well as problems they may create. Biological resources are grouped into those that affect agriculture, such as...

This article introduces a multinomial logit model that uses ancillary information to control for uncertainty in both the observed choices made by respondents, and in the attributes of a respondent's choice set. Simulated data are used to compare the performance of this estimator versus simpler...

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...

This article introduces a multinomial logit model that uses ancillary information to control for uncertainty in both the observed choices made by respondents, and in the attributes of a respondent's choice set. Simulated data are used to compare the performance of this estimator versus simpler...

When estimating hedonic models of housing prices, the use of time series cross-section repeat sales data can provide improvements in estimator efficiency and correct for unobserved characteristics. However, in cases where serial correlation is present, the irregular timing of sales should also...

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...

The range of environmental problems confronting agriculture has expanded in recent years. As the largest program designed to mitigate the negative environmental effects of agriculture, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) has broadened its initial focus on reductions in soil erosion to...

Concerns about the impact of farm production on the quality of the Nation's drinking and recreational water resources have risen over the past 10 years. Because point sources of pollution were controlled first, agricultural nonpoint sources have become the Nation's largest remaining single...