A growing awareness of the need for a comprehensive approach to regional and local planning for studying urban and rural areas as parts of an interrelated socio-economic system has stimulated interest in the problem of delineating economic regions, areas, and sub-areas. The Office of Business Economics, U. S. Department of Commerce, has designated 173 economic sub-areas in the U. S. for purposes of planning by federal agencies. State governments are also busy delineating planning areas for state and local agencies. Ten such planning areas were designated in South Carolina by executive order of the Governor in March 1969. Presumably, future public policies and programs in such fields as natural resource management, industrial development, housing, and highway construction, etc., will be designed and implemented on the basis of these spatial delineations.

Payment arrangements among members of a cooperative play a critical role in the performance of the cooperative. The impact of three payment systems is assessed for Florida sugarcane cooperatives through a bi-level programming model which incorporates both individual and collective behavior.

The three articles presented at this invited session examine the evolution of water policy planning and the implementation of regulatory tools to achieve water conservation objectives. Two articles focus on Texas water issues and the third focuses on the Georgia planning experience. Each article clearly illustrates the value of sharing advances in hydrologic and economic modeling with local community stakeholder groups to facilitate the credible development of regional water management plans. Moreover, each article hints that stronger regulatory tools may be needed to achieve long-run policy objectives.

Two years ago, in his presidential address, Dr. C. E. Bishop told members of the American Agricultural Economics Association that “… our preoccupation with the problems of the farm firm has resulted in little or no attention to problems that are much more important to the majority of the rural population”.

Preoccupation with the farm firm is evident in our traditional approach to the study of incomes of farm people. There is still a tendency to look at the incomes of farm firms rather than at the incomes of people who farm. Present income statistics are oriented to the farm firm in a way that makes it fairly difficult to study the economic well-being of people involved in farming.

Conservancy districts can plan and apply land treatment and structural measures to reduce flooding and associated damages. The Conservancy District Act permits conservancy districts to appraise benefits and levy assessments to pay the cost of installing, operating, and maintaining works of flood protection not included in legislative appropriations. We are concerned with the method whereby these specified costs are distributed among flood plain farmers.

The assessment criterion is: Each beneficiary shall be assessed in relation to the proportion of benefits received. That is, flood plain farmers are to pay the proportion of specified flood protection costs that equal the proportion of total benefits received. The objective of assessing is consistent and equitable, but there is yet to be developed a method for computing assessments which meet this norm or objective.

U.S. live cattle markets have experienced dramatic shifts in marketing methods over the past two decades, changing the way live cattle prices are discovered. We identify relationships between prices of the five major live cattle marketing regions using Granger causality and directed graph analysis. The two approaches complement each other and reveal that interweek and intraweek price discovery roles for given markets differ. Evidence indicates that Colorado, though a minor market in terms of relative volume, has become an important source of interweek price information to other markets.

As food producers face increasing costs, many greenhouse growers are turning to controlled environment agriculture. The use of light-emitting diode (LED) supplemental lighting systems may increase a producer’s profitability, but it also comes with a unique set of externalities. Using an online survey, we found that showing images of light pollution from supplemental LED lighting sources facilitated respondents to want more regulation with state government being the desired regulator. Several significant factors influenced survey respondents’ posttreatment preference outcomes for different levels of regulation and regulators including demographic characteristics as well as initial attitudes toward LED lighting systems before treatment.

This article investigates the short- and long-term costs of an extreme weather event on retail food prices and consumer expenditures. We utilize the 2011 severe peanut drought as a quasi-natural experiment and find that retail peanut butter prices increased 21.3% as a result of the drought-driven shock in farm peanut production and prices. Moreover, we identify long-term costs due to positive asymmetric price transmission as retail peanut butter prices returned to pre-shock levels much more slowly and remained on average 6.2% higher for 4 years after farm peanut prices returned to pre-shock levels. For consumers, the drought increased peanut butter costs, and the persistence of higher prices in peanut butter led to long-term consumer costs. Peanut butter expenditure on average increased by 4.8% post-shock, with lower-income households increasing expenditures even more. A simple calculation estimates that higher peanut butter prices inflicted a cost of $1.08 billion during the shock, and sticky post-shock peanut butter prices imposed a cost of $628 million to U.S. consumers.

The profitability of U.S. meat producers and the utility of U.S. meat consumers are impacted by the trade of meat. USDA publishes the most prominent publicly available meat trade projections. This study finds USDA projections typically underpredict meat export volumes and overpredict meat import volumes. USDA projections outperform naïve projections for beef and pork exports, but naïve projections at times outperform USDA projections for chicken exports and beef and pork imports, especially at shorter horizons. USDA projections exclude variety cuts, which comprise a sizeable share of beef and pork exports. There remains room for improvement in projecting U.S. meat trade.

This study examines the grazing management plans (GMPs) adoption and prioritization of environmental and economic objectives among U.S. cow-calf and stocker operations, utilizing 2020–2021 survey data and logistic regression analysis. Findings reveal regional adoption differences, with higher rates in the Midwest. Operations with succession plans, larger grazing lands, and stocker activities are more likely to adopt GMPs. Operations with more privately owned land and smaller herd sizes prefer environmental goals, while those with less grazing land prioritize economic outcomes due to resource concerns. The study provides insights for policies promoting GMP adoption and sustainability in the U.S. beef sector.

We estimate a travel cost model for the George Washington & Jefferson National Forests using an On-Site Latent Class Poisson Model. We show that the constraints of ad-hoc truncation and homogenous preferences significantly impact consumer surplus estimates derived from the on-site travel cost model. By relaxing the constraints, we show that more than one class of visitors with unique preferences exists in the population. The resulting demand functions, price responsive behaviors, and consumer surplus estimates reflect differences across these classes of visitors. With heterogeneous preferences, a group of ‘local residents’ exists with a probability of 8% and, on average take 113 visits.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. households received economic impact payments through several federal aid programs. Simultaneously, the U.S. food sector experienced dramatic shifts in the source of demand and consumer spending behavior. Motivated by this, we evaluate the associations between federal financial assistance and both household food-at-home and food-away-from-home expenditures. The first two economic impact payments were associated with increased spending on food-at-home, while only the first was associated with increased spending on food away from home. All three payments were associated with an increased probability of spending on food away from home.

Fed cattle profitability is determined by complicated dynamic processes of body growth, carcass development, and seasonal prices. A structural model is constructed to contend with all these dynamic processes to predict optimal market timing. Informed simulations are conducted and compared to those observed in the data, as well as to a previous model ignoring the evolution of carcass value. The results indicate that significant improvements to profitability are attainable with the new method. The results also indicate the opportunity cost of not accounting for carcass value, even with error, is more severe than when these dynamics are ignored.

This study explores the economics of culling decisions in cow-calf operations in the Southern U.S. with a novel application of a dynamic mathematical programing model. The results provide an optimal culling strategy under the base model and a range of optimal strategies that vary with respect to different components such as fertility probabilities, prices, replacement costs, and pregnancy checking. The results suggest that producers should cull all cows that are older than age 10 and cows that fail to calve once they reach the age of 7. The sensitivity analysis underlines the impact of market conditions, replacement costs, and pregnancy check use on the optimal culling decisions.

The difficulties associated with improving forest management practices on land held by farmers and other small landowners have been well documented. In North Carolina roughly four-fifths of all forest area is to be found in such holdings. To evaluate alternative strategies for improving land management, it is important to have information concerning the rates of change in land use on existing units. Aerial photographs provide a valuable source of this information, especially when flights have been made over an area at regular intervals extending back over several decades. In general, such regularity of aerial photo flights does exist for the continental United States. This article describes the use of such photographic data to construct land-use transition matrices.

Systems analysis would be a useful tool for certain kinds of pesticide research, particularly that involving decisions affecting the environment or the ecosystem. A well-designed systems analysis would permit researchers and policymakers to learn more about the complete effects of their decisions relating to pesticides. It is doubtful whether any one person or group of persons can mentally formulate all the complex effects of a pesticide on the environment, on optimum farm organization and practices, on human welfare, and on the myriad of other interrelated factors.