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The USDA Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) provides financial assistance to encourage producers to adopt conservation practices. Historically, one of the most common practices is conservation tillage, primarily the use of no-till planting. The objectives of this research were to determine crop residue using remote sensing, an indicator of tillage intensity, without using training data and examine its performance at the field level. The Landsat Thematic Mapper Series platforms can provide global temporal and spatial coverage beginning in the mid-1980s. In this study, we used the Normalized Difference Tillage Index (NDTI), which has proved to be robust and accurate in studies built upon training datasets. We completed 10 years of residue maps for the 150,000 km2 study area in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota and validated the results against field-level survey data. The overall accuracy was between 64% and 78% with additional improvement when survey points with suspect geolocation and satellite tillage estimates with fewer than four dates of Landsat images were excluded. This study demonstrates that, with Landsat Archive available at no cost, researchers can implement retrospective, untrained estimates of conservation tillage with sufficient accuracy for some applications.

Voluntary land conservation programs depend upon the willingness of land owners to participate. Since participation requires commitment to long-term contracts, most studies on participation focus on changes to the pecuniary incentives facing land owners. This study presents a large-scale field experiment within the USDA's Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) that examines whether informational outreach, including behavioral nudges, could improve land owners' willingness to participate. The experiment evaluates the impact of three types of reminder letters on the rate at which land is offered into the CRP. We find that for the most well-informed group, farms with expiring CRP contracts, the reminder letters did improve participation. We interpret this result as evidence of inattentive behavior. We do not detect any differences in the estimated treatment effects among the basic reminder letter and the letters augmented with peer comparisons and social norm messaging, nor do we detect any treatment effect among currently unenrolled farms. From a policy perspective, these results imply that the USDA can generate additional CRP offers among farms with expiring contracts at an average cost of $39 per additional offer. Assuming a twenty-five million acre program, reminder letters sent during every sign-up period would result in re-enrollment offers from an additional 420,000 acres. Using simulations based on offers from prior CRP sign-ups, we estimate that these additional offers in the CRP auction would reduce program costs. Depending on the year of simulation, the outreach effort achieves a benefit-cost ratio of between 20:1 and 90:1.

This paper investigates the measurement of risk exposure in agriculture and its linkages with input and output decisions. We develop a conceptual analysis of risk under general risk preferences, including cumulative prospect theory. The approach is applied to a sample of U.S. farms from 1996 to 2011. In a multi-input, multi-output framework, the analysis documents the effects of management on production risk exposure and estimates the cost of risk under alternative frameworks. We find that variable inputs contribute to increasing risk, while livestock contributes to reducing risk. Nonfarm income reduces the cost of risk.

Policies that seek to reduce groundwater open-access externalities may be in conflict with the facilitation of water trading during droughts. Using panel data on cropland values, we examine this interaction in the context of groundwater export restrictions. We find that land subject to restrictions experienced a relative decline of 34% ($2,057/acre, roughly half of foregone potential water sales revenue) during the drought immediately following implementation of the policies. During a later, more severe drought, there is no difference in value. Our empirical approach also provides novel estimates of the value of changes in groundwater stock.

The literature on climate risk and crop yields is currently focused on the potential for highly nonlinear marginal effects, essentially modeling the threshold effects with a yield function that maps weather inputs into crop yields. Implicit in this line of research is the assertion that the traditional quadratic model of crop yield suffers from specification bias. This article examines this assumption by using the Flexible Fourier Transforms (FFT) to allow for global flexibility in the weather effects while also maintaining the traditional quadratic model as a nested model specification. In order to speak to the global flexibility of FFT, as well as to provide both robustness to outliers and information on the scale effects of weather variables, this article compares FFT with restricted cubic spline (RCS) and quadratic models in a quantile regression framework. Using U.S. county-level data on corn, soybeans, and winter wheat from 1975 to 2013, we find that while the threshold effects are largely captured by the traditional quadratic model, we statistically reject the hypothesis that the quadratic model is sufficiently flexible. We find that, under the more flexible FFT functional forms, at lower temperatures there is a greater positive impact of marginal increases in temperature on yield than with the quadratic model, which suggests a different yield-temperature relationship than found in much of the literature on threshold effects of temperature on crop yields, and is more consistent with the positive effects of minor temperature increases found in some of the Ricardian climate effect literature.

The use of cover crops on U.S. cropland increased by 50 percent between 2012 and 2017. During this period, Federal and State conservation programs increased efforts to promote cover crops through financial and technical assistance. Cover crops-such as unharvested cereal rye, oats, winter wheat, or clover-are typically added to a crop rotation during the period in between two commodity or forage crops. Cover crops provide a living, seasonal coverage of soil that can result in a variety of on-farm benefits such as increased soil moisture capacity. Cover crops can also provide public environmental benefits such as less runoff of sediments and nutrients into waterways, reduced flooding in watersheds, and greater soil carbon sequestration.

USDA, Economic Research Service researchers examined rotational grazing practices of cow-calf operations, providing one of the first nationally representative datasets to describe rotational grazing systems. They defined two rotational systems-intensive and basic-according to length of grazing period.The adoption rate for basic rotational grazing is consistent across all regions, but the Appalachian and Northern Plains/Western Corn Belt regions had the highest adoption rate of intensive rotational grazing.Average feed costs are higher for basic rotational grazing than for intensive rotational grazing in all regions except the Northern Plains/Western Corn Belt.

When natural resources degrade to the degree that their intended use is impaired, then a given land parcel is said to have a “resource concern.” Soil resource concerns, such as soil erosion or low organic matter, can result from geographic factors as well as past and ongoing management decisions. In the long run, soil concerns can reduce agricultural productivity and profitability. Soil concerns also can exacerbate off-farm impacts of farming and ranching, such as downstream water pollution. Using a nationally representative sample of land from the 2017 National Resources Inventory (NRI), the USDA, Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) found that 18 percent of cropland acreage has water erosion, and 14 percent has a wind-erosion concern.