Sustaining natural resource stocks especially those underpinning the capacity to produce food is key to most definitions of sustainable development. Yet troubling evidence has surfaced of instances where the rural poor were forced to sacrifice long-term sustainability for the sake of near-term...

The most severe challenges to sustainable development occur where many poor people struggle to eke out a living from marginal lands. In some cases, high human populations on fragile lands have led agricultural productivity to deteriorate (García-Barrios and García-Barrios, 1990, Mink, 1993,...

This paper introduces a spatial bioeconomic model for study of potential cellulosic biomass supply at regional scale. By modeling the profitability of alternative crop production practices, it captures the opportunity cost of replacing current crops by cellulosic biomass crops. The model draws...

This document is a primer in statistics for applied economists using the SPSS statistical software. It is intended for use with a one-week training workshop designed to acquaint research professionals with basic statistical procedures for analyzing socio-economic survey data. The document...

This paper outlines the economic surplus approach to economic impact assessment and how it may be applied to natural resource management (NRM) projects. Three challenges confront NRM impact assessment: measurement, attribution, and valuation of non-market impacts. While various methods for...

Ten alternative seed corn contract specifications are evaluated with respect to nitrate leaching and profitability for the processor firm (principal) and contracted grower (agent). A whole-farm optimization and feasibility analysis suggest that contract terms can be used to reduce non-point...

Sustainable agricultural research and education have gained acceptability within the land-grant system in less than a decade, an impressive change. Attitudes were changed by a set of forces which include lobbying by sustainable agriculture advocates, requests from farmers as a result of the...

How do farmers and agribusinesses decide whether to adopt site-specific crop management (SSCM)? In spite of many agronomic experiments on variable rate fertilizer application, the broader adoption question has received little attention. In order to discuss SSCM adoption issues, five focus group...

As contractual agriculture expands, contract design offers a non-regulatory opportunity to reduce non-point source pollution. A risk programming analysis of seed corn contract designs illustrates a tractable empirical principal-agent model, and shows that grower risk preferences affect contract...

The authors present an overview of agricultural systems models. Beginning with why systems are modeled and for what purposes, the paper examines types of agricultural systems and associated model types. The broad categories range from pictorial (iconic) models to descriptive analogue models to...