This study examines soybean grower adoption of the Roundup Ready® (RR) weed management program with and without a residual herbicide application, and grower concerns regarding weed resistance to herbicides using telephone survey data from of 357 growers in 2007. It also estimates the pecuniary...

This study examined adoption of ten best management practices (BMPs) to control weed resistance to herbicides. Using data from a survey of 1,205 U.S. cotton, corn, and soybean growers, count data models were estimated to explain the total number of practices frequently adopted. Ordered probit...

"Pouring rights" contracts between soft drink companies and schools have created substantial controversy. Treating the issue as externality problem, we analyze the Pigouvian tax solution and propose a contract between the government and schools to provide an incentive compatible method for...

Factors Determining Best Management Practice Adoption Incentives and the Impact of Green Insurance

A conceptual model is developed to evaluate the effect of Bt corn on risk. Results highlight the importance of distinguishing between marginal and aggregate risk effects and demonstrate that the effect of Bt corn on risk depends crucially on the price paid for the technology. Empirical results...

Water shortage has been a significant issue for several decades in the Texas High Plains. Agriculture has been identified as the main activity contributing to this shortage. To address this issue, many efforts have been focused on the possible adoption of sophisticated irrigation systems with...

We describe a composed-error model for estimating pest-damage functions. The composed-error model, originally developed to account for statistical noise when estimating technical efficiency, removes the effect of experimental errors when estimating the variance of yield loss from pest damage. As...

A recently developed nested error component model for unbalanced panel data is used to estimate insect damage functions. The model estimates the separate random effects for location and year on the variability of yield loss and has smaller standard errors for the regression coefficient than the...

We analyze the effects of crop insurance and the Marketing Loan Program on optimal nitrogen use and acreage allocation for a case cotton-sorghum farm in Texas. A mathematical programming model is used to simulate the optimal nitrogen fertilizer rate, crop acreage allocation, coverage level, and...

This paper describes a composed error model for estimating the conditional distribution of yield loss to serve as an insect damage function. The two-part error separates yield variability due to pest damage from other non-pest factors such as soil heterogeneity, non-uniform application of...