BENEFIT COST ANALYSIS OF THE 2002 EQIP FARM BILL PROVISIONS

Benefit and cost estimates for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) are given. The 2002 Farm Bill increased EQIP funding five fold and allows a broader scope of participation. Estimates for seven classes of environmental benefits and the sensitivity of those estimates to program implementation alternatives are included.Agricultural and Food Policy,

The Potential for LISA -Type Nitrogen Use Adjustments in Mainstream U.S. Agriculture

Concern about environmental impacts of nitrogen fertilizer use is increasing. Mainstream agriculture is dependent on nitrogen fertilizer and use patterns are polluting water resources. A five cent tax on nitrogen fertilizer is shown to have three benefits. National nitrogen fertilizer use is estimated to decline about 10 percent. Use of legume-produced nitrogen increases and crop use of nitrogen declines only 5 percent. A reduction in wasted legume-produced nitrogen equal to 2.5 percent of nitrogen application in the baseline occurs due to more growing of legumes and other crops in rotation. The nitrogen tax is not without costs. Soil erosion and pesticide use are estimated to increase 2.2 and 1.7 percent, respectively, in response to the tax

A Preliminary Look at the Potential for Increasing Both Food and Fiber Production in the Southeast Via Land Conversions

The Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) is developing a model to examine land use changes and their associated environmental and economic implications for the Southeast region of the United States. The model will be built as if there were two regions in the U.S. One region is the Southeast with the other region containing the remainder of the 48 contiguous states. The driving force within the model will be assumed levels of demand for, or prices of, various agricultural and silvicultural products on a market region and national level. The CARD southeast model will be a cost minimization linear program. It will allocate the land resources of the nation to alternative uses to produce the specified levels of crop, forest, and pasture/range products. The model will also incorporate constraints such as allowable erosion levels, regional shifts in production, and levels of government policy variables. The basic hypothesis of this research is that future change sin national, including exports, and regional demand levels will cause substantial acreages of land in the Southeast to be converted to an alternative use. Such conversions could also occur as a result of government policy decisions. The land use conversions to be included in the Southeast are all directions between forest, crop, orchard, idle and pasture or range, and dryland to irrigated. In the remainder of the nation allowable conversions will be forest and pasture to crop and dryland to irrigated. The model will be an extension of current CARD national models by including for the Southeast the land conversions noted above. Also the crops of apples, citrus, peaches, pecans, sweet-corn, tomatoes, tobacco, sugarcane, rye, rice, and sweet and Irish potatoes will be included in the endogenous rather than exogenous crop sector for selected states as shown in Appendix 1. An overview of the model process is given in Figure 1

Analysis of 1990 Farm Bill Conservation Options

This report summarizes the ARIMS analysis for the 1990 Farm Bill Conservation Initiatives Work Group. Three major tasks were completed. First, ARIMS was updated to reflect the short-run nature of possible 1990 farm bill policies. Specifically, ARIMS now incorporates a more differentiated set of land resources and crop production technology to match the requirements of the 1985 Food Security Act. Second, baseline solutions for 1990, 1995, and 2000 were estimated. The solutions included the conservation titles of the 1985 Food Security Act. The baselines differed in the specification of acres in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and in conservation compliance provisions. The 1990 baseline had a 40-million-acre CRP requirement; the 1995 baseline has a 40-million-CRP plus conservation compliance; and the 2000 baseline has an eight-million CRP with conservation compliance. Third, two alternative farm bill policy options were evaluated. The water quality option involved adding 10 million acres to the 40-million-acre CRP enrollment in the 1995 baseline. The selection of the 10 million acres was based on potential water quality impacts. The Trees for the U.S. program evaluated the conversion to tress of 37 million targeted acres of cropland and marginal pasture land

Compromise Solution for Economic-Environmental Decisions in Agriculture

Least cost production versus the environmental on- and off-site erosion damage of agriculture is evaluated in a policy context for a major Corn Belt watershed. Compromise programming, previously utilized in firm-level multi-criteria decision making problems is applied to a regional agricultural production model with environmental policy goal trade-offs. The crop sector model allocates land, water, labor, capital, and commodity-program base acres to crop production. Production options include four conservation practices, three tillage methods, and several crop rotations. Crop yield and fertilizer levels are dependent upon erosion. Cropping options selected allow for both wind and water erosion. The vector of objectives include three minimization functions: current production cost, future value of productivity loss, and sediment damage. Vector optimization technique was used to generate the payoff matrix containing efficient but simultaneously unobtainable solutions. Given the ideal but infeasible solution vector we generated efficient solutions in the compromise subset corresponding to the L1. L2. and Loo metrics. Trade-off relations were developed using the noninferior set estimation technique

Regional Estimation of Soil Carbon and Other Environmental Indicators Using EPIC and i_EPIC

Computer models are important tools for assessing regional carbon sequestration and other environmental impacts of agricultural management practices. The Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) model is a very flexible model that has been used to make a wide range of field- and regional-scale environmental assessments. Large regional-scale applications of EPIC and similar models can require thousands of runs, resulting in a huge data management task. To address this problem, the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) has developed an interactive EPIC (i_EPIC) software package that provides an automated approach to executing large sets of EPIC simulations. Overviews of both the latest EPIC version and the i_EPIC software package are presented. We also present examples of regional applications using both EPIC and i_EPIC conducted by the Resource and Environmental Policy Division of CARD, by the Joint Global Change Research Institute of the University of Maryland and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and by the Resource Assessment Division of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture

National and Regional Implications of Conservation Compliance

Soil erosion as an on-site problem received much attention in the 1985 Food Security Act (FSA), which established programs for the Conservation Reserve and conservation compliance. The 1985 FSA explicitly linked farmers\u27 resource use and conservation activities to benefits received from commodity programs. Much debate has ensued on erosion standards for compliance and farm income trade-offs. Farm-level uncertainties about meeting conservation compliance standards and about the trade-offs between limiting soil loss and maintaining farm income are evident. The objective of the analysis described herein was to provide information on national and regional implications of conservation compliance

The 1989 Recommended Pesticide and Nitrogen Use Survey: Description and Policy Applications

The public and the agricultural community are concerned with the impact of agrichemical use on the environment. Of particular concern is the impact of pesticides and nitrogen on the quality of surface and ground waters (Nielson and Lee 1987). Although a national effort is under way to address agricultural contributions to water contamination, lack of data is hindering progress. Data are needed to characterize agrichemical use and its subsequent fate and transport throughout the ecosystem. Reliable data are vital for informed policy decisions weighing the potential risks and benefits (Delwiche 1970). In the absence of that data about total amounts of agrichemicals being used on crops and the rates and methods of application, it is difficult to describe the link between agricultural porduction practices and environmental quality, or to assess the impacts of programs and policies addressing water quality. This report documents the 1989 Recommended Pesticide and Nitrogen Use Survey. The survey was conducted to alleviate part of the data deficiency by collecting detailed information on recommended pesticide and nitrogen uses and application practices in 48 states. Information on usage was obtained by crop, tillage practice, and soil texture. Crops covered in the survey included alfalfa, barley, corn grain, corn silage, cotton oats, pasture, other hay, peanuts, sorghum grain, sorghum silage, soybeans, spring and winter wheat, and sunflowers. Tillage practices included spring and fall plow conventional tillage, conservation tillage, ridge tillage, and no tillage. By providing detailed information on the rate and total amount of agrichemicals applied to the soil surface, the survey provides data for investigating the behavioral and economic links between environmental quality and decision making within agricultural production. In addition, the data can be used in assesing the impacts of policies and porgrams addressing water quality

Fermi Large Area Telescope Constraints on the Gamma-ray Opacity of the Universe

The Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) includes photons with wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared, which are effective at attenuating gamma rays with energy above ~10 GeV during propagation from sources at cosmological distances. This results in a redshift- and energy-dependent attenuation of the gamma-ray flux of extragalactic sources such as blazars and Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). The Large Area Telescope onboard Fermi detects a sample of gamma-ray blazars with redshift up to z~3, and GRBs with redshift up to z~4.3. Using photons above 10 GeV collected by Fermi over more than one year of observations for these sources, we investigate the effect of gamma-ray flux attenuation by the EBL. We place upper limits on the gamma-ray opacity of the Universe at various energies and redshifts, and compare this with predictions from well-known EBL models. We find that an EBL intensity in the optical-ultraviolet wavelengths as great as predicted by the "baseline" model of Stecker et al. (2006) can be ruled out with high confidence.Comment: 42 pages, 12 figures, accepted version (24 Aug.2010) for publication in ApJ; Contact authors: A. Bouvier, A. Chen, S. Raino, S. Razzaque, A. Reimer, L.C. Reye

A Backward Bending Supply Response from Some Dairy Producers?

A number of dairy producers in Utah and probably elsewhere denounced the milk tax last summer as being counterproductive. The claim (usually made by small producers) was that financial obligations of providing for debt service and family living dictated that they must increase production if price fell. Discussions with a number of producers about the Dairy Diversion Program indicates that many who chose not to sign up did so after some analysis. They made the nonparticipation choice because they determined (rightly or wrongly) that their volume of business during the life of the program and thereafter would not provide them with sufficient income. They reasoned that with prices as they are now and with probable decreases after the end of the program that they would not be able to meet financial obligations. They, therefore, have chosen to maintain or expand herd size and production