We use a Bayesian approach to estimate elasticities of former Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) land allocation and the impact of the US–China trade conflict on post-CRP land transitions. Economically acceptable elasticities of land exiting CRP are important for applied analysis, including market shocks and environmental policy. Taking as given the total area exiting the CRP, the Phase 1 deal raised the posterior mean of national post-CRP soybean area by 155 thousand acres and the market facilitation program by 89 thousand acres. Cross-commodity effects are important, and elasticities vary depending on the direction and magnitude of changes in net returns and payments.

This study examines the impact of land tenure rights on the adoption of short- and long-term agricultural practices and the impact of these practices on the income and food insecurity for rural households in Burkina Faso. The bivariate probit model and propensity score matching are used to analyze data collected from 4,398 rural households. The results show that ownership of permanent land rights only increases the likelihood of adopting long-term agricultural practices. In addition, adoption of short-term practices increases household income and reduces food insecurity, while adoption of long-term practices only increases household income.

We use a dynamic model of the U.S. apple industry separated into organic and conventional production to better measure the impacts of pest or disease outbreaks on producers and consumers, along with an equilibrium displacement model to simulate welfare effects from various shocks compared to a baseline. Our results show that the impacts of the outbreaks differ between organic and conventional production methods. Growers’ and consumers’ responses to shocks differ widely across the industry. Farmers and policy makers should use these findings to appropriately respond to different shocks and production methods.

This study uses a marginal treatment effects approach and farm household rice survey data from Northern Ghana to examine the heterogeneous effects of agricultural technologies on household welfare. Results indicate significant heterogeneity in the gains from the adoption of improved rice technologies among farmers. We found significant evidence of a pattern of positive selection on unobserved gains from the adoption of agricultural technologies on rice yield and household dietary diversity scores (HDDS). Moreover, the policy-relevant treatment effects suggest that reducing the distance to sources of agricultural technologies increases rice yield and HDDS through technology adoption.

U.S. soybean farmers are currently grappling with dicamba herbicide drift. Using a network diffusion framework that accommodates key features of soybean farmer networks, we estimate the damages incurred from dicamba drift across different regions. Under our baseline assumptions, we estimate an average yield loss of 3% and predict sizable levels of forced switching to dicamba-resistant seed in response to drift. The relative importance of drift on damage and seed choice holds across a range of economic and network assumptions. In the absence of policy, this damage may cause regional adoption rates of dicamba-resistant soybean seed to increase.

Faced with risky yields and returns, risk-averse farmers require a premium to take risks. In this paper, we estimate individual farmers’ degrees of risk aversion to adjust for the risk premium in returns and to replace the farmers’ realized returns with their certainty equivalent returns in the production function. In that way, the effect of the inputs on returns will automatically be risk-adjusted, i.e., we obtain risk-adjusted marginal effects of inputs, which can be used in decision-making support of farmers’ input choices in production. Using farm-level data from organic basmati rice smallholders in India, we illustrate this method using nonparametric production functions. The results show that the input elasticities and returns-to-scale estimates change when the farmers’ degree of risk aversion is taken into consideration.

We investigate the role of optimism bias in bull price expectations using incentivized lab-in-the-field experiments with Alabama and Tennessee cattle producers. We develop bull price prediction tasks and reward accurate predictions. We find that the EPD information provision prevents optimism bias from contaminating price expectations in the whole sample. However, we also document that, unlike buyers, sellers are prone to unrealistic optimistic expectations, and our results reveal that optimism bias can be moderated by the type of expected progeny difference information utilized, breed characteristics, and regional differences in cattle operations. We contribute to the literature by documenting the role of behavioral biases.

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.

We develop and analyze an unexplored mechanism to reduce biorefinery supply chain costs when the feedstock is a perennial crop: adjusting the age structure, and hence yield, of the perennial feedstock. The non-monotonicity of the age-yield function introduces a non-convexity to the cost minimization problem. We show that, despite this, the problem has a solution and present analytic and numeric comparative statics, finding that larger refineries are most likely to benefit from optimizing age structure. The model is calibrated to the sugarcane industry in Brazil. The cost reductions from optimizing age, compared to the observed regional average age, are less than 1%.

We estimate the economic cost of nutrient reductions from riparian buffers in two counties in western Maryland. The costs and gains for farmers are estimated for establishing riparian buffers under the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. For nutrient reductions, we utilize nitrogen and phosphorus mitigation loads from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Model and own estimates from our synoptic studies. We show that costs of reducing nutrients vary based on buffer type, its location, and the nutrient pollutant. We also show that installing riparian buffers alongside existing forests could be a more cost-effective practice for reducing nitrogen than other riparian buffers.