The Opportunity Cost of the Conservation Reserve Program: A Kansas Land Example

The effects of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) on farmland values is investigated using a set of parcel-level data for land sales in Kansas over the period 1998 to 2014. The sales data are used to estimate a hedonic model of land values that allows for the opportunity cost of CRP enrollment to vary across space and time. Factors impacting the opportunity costs include the relative productivity of land, returns to farming, and the time remaining under the CRP contracts. We find that the discount associated with having land under CRP contract averages 7%

Clowns do ethnography: An experiment in long-distance comic failure

This paper examines the role of clowning in practice-as-research, and explores tensions between aspiration and execution in interdisciplinary projects. It draws on documentary assets (video screen grabs, photographs, texts) from a version of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis devised online and presented at The Light in Leeds as Ugly Scenes (Performance Studies international, Psi#18). It is also an experiment in writing ‘for’ and ‘as’ idiots, bringing together four interlocuting voices: those of two academics ‘in conversation with’ their antagonists and clown-esque alter egos, Kurt Zarniko and Teddy Love. The performance involved collaboration between academics and artists in the UK, USA, and Greece in the form of online auditioning, online devising, and collaborative writing. Formed into an international company, the group used open-source software (Google Docs, Skype, and Snagit) as platforms that offer productive arenas for live performance and improvisation. These platforms have an inherent potential for technological calamity (which is understood as fruitful in clown and comic modes). The actual staging of this work by this international but amateur outfit presented numerous obstacles, comical ‘failures’ and shortcomings, and there remains a wealth of material that offers a rich resource for a visually striking critical reflection

Payment Limitations and Acreage Decisions under Risk Aversion: A Simulation Approach

Payment limits have played an important role in U.S. farm policy deliberations for the last thirty years. Current limits are largely nonbinding. Proposals to strengthen and enforce limits are currently in discussion. We evaluate the likely effects of such proposals on acreage for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice in several important producing states. Our results generally indicate that payment limits are unlikely to significantly affect acreage in most cases; exceptions occur for cotton and rice, where the probability that limits would be binding is much greater and thus more likely to affect production. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.

Recent Commodity Price Movements in Historical Perspective

Important agricultural commodity prices more than tripled from prices observed in 2005 and 2006 to those observed in the spring and sum-mer of 2008. Prices subsequently fell precip-itously so that by early November 2008 (and continuing in the subsequent few months), the near-term futures prices of corn, wheat, and soybeans stood about 50–70 % higher than be-fore the price run-up began.1 The huge percentage price increases in 2007 and 2008 demanded attention from the press and policymakers concerned about food price increases (Washington Post 2008; Lazear 2008; Glauber 2008). Of even greater con-cern are impacts on hunger among the poor in poor countries (Benson et al. 2008). Many economists summarized the potential sources of the price jumps and assessed their rela-tive importance (McCalla 2008; Trostle 2008a; OECD 2008). My quick assessment of this lit-erature is that once the specific price changes to be explained and time periods have been stan-dardized, economists are in reasonable agree-ment about the likely causal factors and their impacts, at least in broad terms. My aims here are modest. I do not attempt to attribute recent price changes to such fac-tors as: (a) biofuels policy; (b) jumps in input costs due to energy price shocks; (c) reduced farm subsidies in Europe; (d) exchange rate movements; (e) growth in demand in develop-ing countries; (f) weather shocks; (g) lack of adequate stocks; (h) border policies in export-ing and importing countries; or (i) speculative movements in organized commodity markets

Supply and demand for commodity components: implications of free trade versus the AUSFTA for the US dairy industry *

During the negotiations on the Australia-US free trade agreement (AUSFTA), the US dairy industry vigorously opposed opening the US market to imports of Australian dairy products on the grounds that the US industry would be devastated. Subsequently, the agreement signed in February 2004 made an exception for dairy, providing for only limited quota expansion and no free trade, even at the end of the long implementation period. This paper presents a simulation model of world dairy markets, represented by supply and demand equations for fat and non-fat components of milk and manufactured dairy products. We use the model to analyse the effects on US milk markets of both a hypothetical agreement, allowing free bilateral trade in dairy products, and the actual AUSFTA. An important contribution to the literature is the derivation of explicit supply and demand relationships for milk components. The components model allows an analysis of long-term production, consumption, and trade patterns that is not tied to specific, fungible products. Simulations indicate that increased imports from Australia resulting from bilateral trade liberalisation would have resulted in small reductions in US milk prices and production. The much smaller increases in Australian access to the US market under the actual AUSFTA will have even smaller, almost negligible, impacts. Copyright Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc. and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006.

Impacts of Federal Crop Insurance on Land Use and Environmental Quality

This paper integrates economic and physical models to assess how federal crop revenue insurance programs might affect land use, cropping systems, and environmental quality in the U.S. Corn Belt region. The empirical framework includes econometric models that predict land conversion, crop choices, and crop rotations at the parcel-level based on expectation and variance of crop revenues, land quality, climate conditions, and physical characteristics at each site. The predictions are then combined with site-specific environmental production functions to determine the effect of revenue insurance on nitrate runoff and leaching, soil water and wind erosion, and carbon sequestration. Results suggest that crop insurance will have small impacts on conversions of non-cropland to cropland, and somewhat more significant impacts on crop choice. These changes in crop mix have small impacts on agricultural pollution