Agri-environmental policy is at a crossroads. Over the past 20 years, a wide range of policies addressing the environmental implications of agricultural production have been implemented at the Federal level. Those policies have played an important role in reducing soil erosion, protecting and...

Environmental targeting directs program resources to lands where the greatest environmental benefit will be generated for a given expenditure. The CRP offers annual rental payments and cost-share assistance to farmers in exchange for the establishment of longterm resource-conserving covers....

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...

Conservation programs are a significant part of farm legislation. The recent farm bill increases funding of conservation programs. One result will likely be the increased adoption of basic environmentally benign farming practices, such as conservation tillage. This would lead to improvements in...

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...

Agricultural chemicals and sediment from cropland may reduce the quality of America's surface and ground water resources. The Clean Water Act stipulates that individual States are responsible for controlling agricultural nonpoint source pollution. Most State plans rely chiefly on education and...

Benefit transfer offers an inexpensive alternative to conducting an original study to determine economic value. Unfortunately, benefit transfers can also result in biased welfare estimates. In this paper, we suggest a method of calibrating the benefit transfer to reduce this bias. An empirical...

Public amenities provided by a rural agricultural landscape, arising from open space and farm activity, are important to many citizens and policymakers. Widespread development of farmland in some parts of the country has spawned an expanding array of farmland protection programs by county,...

Pheasant hunting benefits of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) were approximately $80 million/year in 1991 in states where the CRP appears most critical to pheasant populations. To obtain this benefit measure, tire demand for pheasant hunting was estimated using a recently developed...