Consumers tend to overestimate food risks, and news reporting that draws attention to the deadly aspects of animal disease can cause fear in consumers even when a disease is not a food safety issue. We utilize an online survey experiment with U.S. pork consumers to assess how prior knowledge of African swine fever (ASF) and how news headlines and article content can affect pork purchases. We find that consumers are generally unaware of ASF, and almost half of respondents, who are all typically pork consumers, would be unwilling to purchase pork if there were an ASF outbreak in the United States. Within our experiment consumers who have less prior knowledge of ASF hesitated to buy pork, when first hearing of an outbreak. While additional information that ASF is not a human health threat helped mitigate pork avoidance, the placement of food safety assurance in either the headline or body of the article does not show a significantly different impact on consumer willingness to pay. As part of preparation efforts for a potential outbreak, our results emphasize the role of consumers’ prior knowledge and perceptions of the disease, which relays the importance of media cooperation in proactively informing the public about ASF outbreaks and highlighting the nonimpact on human health.

Off-highway vehicle (OHV) use is a rapidly growing outdoor activity that results in a host of environmental and management problems. Federal agencies have been directed to develop travel management plans to improve recreation experiences, reduce social conflicts, and diminish environmental impacts of OHVs. We examine the effect of land access restrictions on the welfare of OHV enthusiasts in Utah using Murdock's unobserved heterogeneity random utility model (Murdock 2006). Our models indicate that changing access to public lands from fully “open” to “limited” results in relatively small welfare losses, but that prohibiting access results in much larger welfare losses.

Economic incentives created by the commodity programs are hypothesized to cause program participants to apply agrichemicals at greater rates than nonparticipants. Corn producers who participate in the USDA feedgrain program are shown to apply nitrogen, herbicides, and insecticides at statistically greater rates than those who do not participate.

Agriculture's impact on the environment is a complex research problem. A challenge to future economic research is to account for the interrelationship between agricultural production activities, soil productivity, erosion, and water quality. It will become increasingly important to determine not only the economic consequences, but also the environmental effectiveness of alternative policies aimed at improving resource use and quality. The application of biophysical simulation models to environmental quality problems provides a means to better understand the complex interaction between agricultural production and environmental quality.

The spread of suburbs into previously rural areas has become commonplace in the United States. A rather striking aspect of this phenomenon has been the discontinuity which results. This aspect is often manifest in a haphazard mixture of unused and densely settled areas which has been described as “sprawl”. A more useful definition of suburban sprawl, its causes, and its consequences, is provided below in order to introduce the econometric objectives of this paper.

Using daily fed cattle purchase transaction records collected by the Packers and Stockyards Program over the period April 1992 to April 1993, we identify characteristics associated with the choices of fed cattle procurement and pricing methods. The methodology involves the use of a multinomial logit model.

Regional concentration; processing capacity; number of head per lot; average weight per head; cattle type; yield grade, quarterly grade, seasonality, and distance from packing plants play a significant role in determining the methods of procurement and pricing chosen by packers. The method chosen by packers to procure fed cattle also affects the choice of a given pricing method.

This paper examines the economic impact of selected farmland characteristics on the appraised value of development rights. Price elasticities are estimated for the size and location of farmland parcels, the amount of road frontage, the existence of panoramic views, and the distance to urban centers. Estimated elasticities suggest that parcel characteristics have a substantial impact on the cost of preserving farmland. For example, the per-acre cost of development rights is estimated to be 53 percent higher on farmland parcels that have a panoramic view of water than on parcels that have no water view. Similarly, the per-acre cost of development rights on a typical 25-acre farm is estimated to be 90 percent higher than on a typical 150-acre farm. Results suggest that the net social benefits obtained through farmland preservation programs may be enhanced by considering the impact of farmland characteristics on the marginal costs of purchasing development rights, when selecting among a set of candidate farms.

This article documents the need for reform of milk pricing in the Northeast. The New York price gouging law can be recast as a fair share law. This new milk policy “kills two birds with one stone.” It corrects regional inequities in raw milk pricing by reforming the pricing of milk at retail by limiting and redistributing excessive retail margins to farmers and consumers. The fair share policy relieves allocative price inefficiency, improves the performance of the federal milk market order pool, and improves the general performance of the Northeast dairy farming and fluid milk industries.

This study uses a field experiment involving 251 adult participants to determine which messages related to climate change, extreme weather events, and decaying infrastructure are most effective in encouraging people to pay more for investments that could alleviate future water-quality risks. The experiment also assesses whether people prefer the investments to be directed toward gray or green infrastructure projects. Messages about global warming induced climate change and decaying infrastructure lead to larger contributions than messages about extreme weather events. The results suggest that people are likely to pay more for green infrastructure projects than for gray infrastructure projects.

New England's dependence upon other regions for much of its food supply has become a cause for concern for farmers, consumers, and public officials. As the debate on the region's need and ability to become more self-sufficient in food production continues, the need for an estimate of current levels of self-sufficiency becomes obvious.

This paper estimates New England's level of self-sufficiency for 1975 using secondary data for population, retail expenditures and farm marketing receipts. The region was found to be about 38 percent self-sufficient in overall food production. It produces a high of 176 percent of its seafood requirements and a low of 3 percent of its red meat. Maine and Vermont are surplus food producers.

Higher propety taxes and uncertainty about post-easement tax levels may create a disincentive for landowners to participate in federal easement programs such as the Wetlands Reserve Program, and thus may distort participation levels in a manner inconsistent with the environmental benefits associated with individual parcels. Support for this hypothesis is provided in an exploratory analysis of state level participation in the Wetlands Reserve Program. If such distortions prove to be policy relevant, then either they should be accounted for in the bid acceptance process of future federal easement programs, or individual states and localities should correct property tax differentials and post-easement tax uncertainty.

A model is developed to determine the minimum weed population where a decision to apply a postemergence herbicide would be profitable. The economic threshold model accounts for changing economic conditions, the effect of weeds on crop quality, the effect of multiple weed species on yield and quality, and uncertainty about spraying period length. The model is uncomplicated enough for microcomputer or programmable calculator applications. An example of weed threshold calculations for round white potatoes is given.

Bilateral trade agreements between Japan and major wine-exporting countries have resulted in tariff eliminations in Japan. This raises questions about how tariffs affect the competitiveness of wine-exporting countries. The generalized dynamic Rotterdam model was used in estimating Japanese wine demand by source. Estimates were then used to project the impact of tariffs on imports of Australian, Chilean, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and U.S. wine. Tariff reductions primarily benefit affected countries, with limited adverse effects on competing countries. The elimination of tariffs on U.S. wine should offset any losses from competing trade agreements.

We investigate allocation of funds by citizens across management options addressing impairments to coastal water quality. We study systematic variation in citizen allocation of funds to adaptive versus preventative strategies including the impact of referundum choices and test whether allocations will be impacted by cuing in the design of the referendum. Two key policy insights from our results: citizens who vote no on a water quality referendum have different preferences over allocating funds and providing cues to voters influenced allocation behavior. These results can assist decision makers in thinking about language used to communicate coastal water quality issues, particularly budget referenda.

Agricultural activities have imposed significant impacts on water resources, leading to hypoxic zones and harmful algal blooms all over the world. Government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals have been making various efforts to reduce this non-point source pollution. Among those efforts, even the more cost-effective examples of performance-based environmental payment programs generally have low participation rates. We investigate the effects of externalities in farmers’ decisions on neighboring farms, incorporating both a knowledge spillover effect and a positive environmental outcome externality of farmers’ best-management practice (BMP) adoption decisions. Our focus is on how these effects may influence the outcome of performance-based payment programs and how policy makers might recognize these effects in the design of cost-effective policies to promote program participation and BMP adoption. Rather than imposing an assumption of profit-maximization or forward-looking behavior, we allow outcomes to emerge from interactions among neighboring farmers. We recommend cost-effective policies across communities depending on their composition. It is more cost-effective to target communities with fewer innovators and/or target the programs towards the least-innovative individuals.

Economic policy analysis is extremely important for the relevancy of the agricultural economics profession, as applied economics is our professional niche. Economic policy analysis, however, as a public decision-support tool, is a challenging endeavor that is difficult to do well. Furthermore, if analysis is to be an input into public policy formulation and implementation, it is not sufficient for applied economists to merely supply high quality economic policy analysis; there must also be a demand for it. As a profession, applied economists appear to pay more attention to the supply of policy analysis, with less consideration of who wants and will use our analysis, or how they will come to know it.

The objective of this analysis was to identify the production practices used by farmers to change seasonal production. Production practices included milk production per cow, proportion of cows milking, number of first lactation animals entering the herd, number of cows leaving the herd, number of days to first breeding, and calves born. Farms that participated in a seasonal pricing plan during 1993, 1994, and 1995 decreased production practice seasonality in response to price premiums, which caused a decrease in production seasonality compared to nonparticipating farms. Participating farms showed a preference for adjusting entering first lactation animals and number of calves born, but did make adjustments in other practices as well.

Wildlife managers must consider the public's preferences for wildlife population levels when determining management policies. In 1996, Maryland farmers, hunters and the general public were surveyed to determine their preferences for increasing, maintaining, or decreasing deer population numbers. Using a random utility theoretic framework with an ordered response probit model, the factors that explain preferences such as residential location, socioeconomic characteristics, landscape damage, agricultural yield loss and vehicle accidents were analyzed.

Recent studies have investigated the efficiencies of policies that use several policy instruments simultaneously (for example, a policy that uses a production subsidy combined with a production quota). Several studies of very specific cases find that optimal combination of two policy instruments is more efficient than optimal independent use of either. In this note we demonstrate using set theory and maximization theory, that all such specific results are examples of a more general result, which is that by combining m instruments efficiently, a government can always be at least as efficient as when using a subset of those m instruments. This result holds for any of the several definitions of “efficiency” in the literature.

A voluntary program is developed to achieve environmental goals through the self-interested choices of farmers under environmental risk and asymmetric information. Farmers behave to maximize expected net returns, and environmental quality standards are formulated through chance constraints. Because the government may not know each farmer's soil type, policy options must be self-selecting. The model is applied empirically to nitrate leaching and runoff from corn production in three New York regions. Asymmetric information between producers and the government would impose additional cost burdens on society, but these costs are modest in the context of other farm programs.