The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) offers incentives for producers and landowners to voluntarily retire cropland. The program’s benefits to the environment, CRP participants, and other crop farmers have made it a recurring focus of farm program legislation. While anecdotal evidence...

CRP is approaching its 20th year of operation. From its inception, concerns have been raised that by retiring millions of acres of cropland, the program could disadvantage farming communities already hard hit by farm sector consolidation and globalization. Clearly the CRP does not benefit...

This document outlines the development of the dynamic functions and simple algorithms that make up the Land Use in Rural New Zealand (LURNZ) land-use intensity module. The module includes stocking rate functions for dairy, sheep, and beef livestock; fertiliser intensity functions for dairy and...

Property rights are powerful. They fundamentally shape both the physical world and our social relations within it. Property choices impact how land and other resources are used (or conserved) and who has access to those resources (or who is excluded). At the same time, cultural discourses about...

Rural land use is important for New Zealand’s economic and environmental outcomes. Using a dynamic econometric model and recent New Zealand data, we estimate the response of land use to changing economic returns as proxied by relevant commodity prices. Because New Zealand is small, export...