Can a single program support farm income and encourage producers to adopt environmentally sound farming practices? While simple in concept, attempting to roll the farm income support features of existing commodity programs and conservation payments into a single program raises questions. Exactly...

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...

The recent 9-billion-gallon increase in corn-based ethanol production, which resulted from a combination of rising gasoline prices and a suite of Federal bioenergy policies, provides evidence of how farmers altered their land-use decisions in response to increased demand for corn. As some...

Agricultural nonpoint pollution is inherently stochastic (e.g., due to weather). In theory, this randomness has implications for the choice and design of policy instruments. However, very few empirical studies have modeled natural variability. This paper investigates the importance of stochastic...

A multitude of design decisions influence the performance of voluntary conservation programs. This Economic Brief is one of a set of five exploring the implications of decisions policymakers and program managers must make about who is eligible to receive payments, how much can be received, for...

Most economic studies of pollution control analyze policies that are optimal for a given set of underlying parameters. Less understood is how such policies perform when the underlying parameters change and policies are not adjusted in response, or what the benefits of adjustment are. We...

Agricultural Land Tenure and Carbon Offsets examines the potential role that land ownership might play in determining the agricultural sector’s involvement in carbon sequestration programs. By estimating the carbon sequestration potential of agricultural producers who own most of the land they...

We analyze how choosing to use a particular type of instrument for agri-environmental payments, when these payments are constrained by the regulatory authority's budget, implies an underlying targeting criterion with respect to costs, benefits, participation, and income, and the tradeoffs among...