2023

September, 2023

Mobile Internet Use and Climate Adaptation: Empirical Evidence from Vietnamese Coffee Farmers

By: Kahsay, Goytom Abraha; Garcia, Nerea Turreira; Bosselmann, Aske Skovmand
This paper investigates the association between mobile internet use (MIU) and climate adaptation among Vietnamese coffee farmers. We find that farmers with access to mobile internet are more likely to take adaptation measures and obtain higher coffee yields using both simple regression and instrumental variable models. Our data suggest that the adaptation results are driven by changes in water and crop management practices and mediated by farmers' access to weather forecasts and farm price information. Policy support for MIU may enhance farmers' climate resilience in developing countries.
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September, 2023

Rural Broadband Connectivity and Access to US Government Farm Support

By: Graven, Atticus; Schaefer, K. Aleks
The Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP) was unique in that it was the first US farm support program that allowed producers to enroll through an online portal rather than in person through a local Farm Service Agency (FSA) office. This research investigates the extent to which broadband connectivity affected access to US government farm support under CFAP. We find that a 1-percentage-point increase in county-level broadband availability is associated with a $2.13 increase in county payments per capita under CFAP. However, this relationship is inherently nonlinear along the rural--urban divide.
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September, 2023

Identifying Constraints to Rural Economic Development: A Development Guidance Function Approach

By: Koirala, Samjhana; Jakus, Paul M.; Watson, Philip
We propose a method that incorporates specific business needs and community goals to identify community assets that most constrain local economic development. Access to a managerial workforce was the most common highly ranked constraint, but the set of most constraining assets varies across communities. Thus, a one-size-fits-all development policy is not appropriate. We also find that constraint rankings are highly correlated among communities that share tourism potential, that share energy resources, or that rely upon production agriculture. Development practitioners may craft a suite of development policies, each tailored to communities of a given typology.
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September, 2023

Reductions in National Forest Campground Reservation Demand from Wildfire

By: Lee, Marissa C.; Suter, Jordan F. ; Bayham, Jude
The impacts of wildfire are widely felt across the United States and expected to increase in coming years. However, little is known about the long-term impacts of wildfire on recreation. We evaluate the impact of wildfire on reservations to US Forest Service (USFS) campgrounds and find that wildfires decrease camping reservations up to 6 years after a fire occurs. The impacts vary across USFS regions, and our analysis reveals the important role of forest cover in determining the magnitude and duration of impacts. Our results imply that wildfires reduce benefits to campers, which can translate into less spending in nearby communities.
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September, 2023

Selectivity Bias and Cattle Price in the Cattle Procurement Market

By: Hildebrand, Kayla; Chung, Chinjin
We examine selectivity bias in the US cattle procurement market. We hypothesize that feedlots optimize profits by selecting specific cattle to sell either in the cash market or through alternative marketing agreements. High-quality cattle are more likely to be sold in the alternative market as prices are not fully calculated until after harvest, allowing carcass quality premiums to be added. Consequently, it is assumed that low-quality cattle are sold in the cash market to avoid potential carcass discounts. Depending on a feedlotÕs size, relationship with packers, and marketing costs, these selection assumptions may not be accurate and bias prices.
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September, 2023

CowÐCalf Producer Preferences for Bull Genomic Enhanced Expected Progeny Differences

By: Smith, Katy V. ; DeLong, Karen L.; Griffith, Andrew P.; Boyer, Christopher N.; Martinez, Charley; Jensen, Kimberley L.
Genomic enhanced expected progeny differences (GE-EPDs) combine expected progeny differences (EPDs) with DNA information to improve EPD accuracy values. In 2020, Tennessee cattle producers completed a between-subjects choice experiment for bulls marketed with either EPDs or GE-EPDs. Panel Tobit regression results indicate that, on average across all considered EPDs, producers were not willing to pay significantly more for GE-EPDs than for EPDs. However, producers were willing to pay more for the calving ease direct EPD if it was genomic enhanced. This is the first known study to evaluate producersÕ value of improved accuracy scores associated with GE-EPDs.
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September, 2023

Land Rental Markets, Specialization, and Rural Household Income: Evidence from the North China Plain

By: Wang, Qian; Li, Fan; Heerink, Nico; Yu, Jin; Fleskens, Luuk; Ritsema, Coen J.
Using panel data for the years 2013, 2015, and 2017 collected through field surveys in eight counties in the North China Plain, we examine the relationship between smallholdersÕ land rental behavior and their (agricultural) incomes, with a particular focus on heterogeneous specialization among smallholders. We find that farming-specialized households experience a significant higher increase in agricultural income and a larger decrease in poverty incidence by renting in land than nonspecialized households. Off-farm specialized households had a decreased likelihood of being poor by renting out land, whereas nonspecialized households experienced no decrease in poverty incidence after renting out land.
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September, 2023

Stocks of Wealth and the Value-Added Food and Agriculture Sector

By: Jablonski, Becca B.R.; Pender, John; Bauman, Allison; Rupasingha, Anil
Despite substantial effort to conceptualize wealth as supporting positive community economic development, little research tests the relationship between development outcomes and community wealth. This research assesses the relationship between the value-added food and agriculture business (VAFAB) sector and stocks of community wealth by leveraging a new dataset of stocks of community wealth and National Establishment Time Series data. We find significant relationships between the growth of VAFAB establishments and employment and stocks of community wealth. These results have implications for economic developers and policy makers in prioritizing investments should they want to grow the local VAFAB sector.
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September, 2023

Investigating the Efficacy of Government Rebates: A Case of the Smart Irrigation System

By: Lai, Yufeng; Yue, Chengyan; Watkins, Eric; Barnes, Mike
Government rebates provide monetary incentives to encourage consumers' adoption of eco-friendly technologies. Understanding how consumers perceive the value of rebate is crucial to policy makers. We use the smart irrigation system as an example and design choice experiments that present rebates in two formats: the total device cost and the cost consumers needed to pay versus the total device cost and the rebate value. We find that consumers discount the value of the rebate more when presented with rebate value. Additionally, the framing of incentives has a spillover effect on the perceived value of a seemingly unrelated attribute (i.e., water saving).
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September, 2023

The Impacts of Enhanced Rice Quality Genetics on Food Security and Producer Profitability

By: Nalley, Lawton Lanier; Durand-Morat, Alvaro
Increasing milling potential could provide more food for human consumption at current yields and input uses. We estimate the impact of increasing rice milling yields in Arkansas from 2004 to 2020 using actual yields by variety. The results suggest that a marginal 1% increase in the percentage of whole kernels could increase the number of rice rations by 0.89 million to 1.05 million annually, or up to 2.94 million and 3.5 million annually if the genetics of all Arkansas rice were at least at the standard of a popular purebred variety. Improving rice milling yields can have significant food security implications.
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May, 2023

Unconventional Oil and Gas Development and Agricultural Land Use in the United States

By: Xu, Yuelu; Elbakidze, Levan; Etienne, Xiaoli
Using county-level data from 1997 to 2018, we examine the effects of unconventional oil and gas (UOG) industry growth on agricultural acreage in the United States. We find that, on average, each active UOG well reduces crop acreage by 3.3 acres in counties with UOG production. However, the impacts vary by region. The relationship is positive in the Southwest, U-shaped in the Great Plains, and negative in Appalachia. Variations of impacts across regions result from differences in geology and historic developments in the energy and agricultural sectors.
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May, 2023

What Determines ChinaÕs Agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution? An Improved Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index Decomposition Analysis

By: Chen, Yufeng; Miao, Jiafeng
Using the logarithmic mean Divisia index method, this paper decomposes changes in ChinaÕs agricultural nonpoint source pollution into five factors: emission intensity, production scale, labor intensification, urbanization, and population-scale factors. Moreover, we further explore the contribution of each factor at different agricultural policy stages and the impact of subsidies on emissions. Our main findings show that emission intensity is the main restraining factor of pollution, while production scale plays the greatest effect on aggravating loads. The incentive effect of agricultural subsidies reduces emissions, but the expansion of government fiscal expenditures will lead to an increase.
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May, 2023

Decomposing USDA Ending Stocks Forecast Errors

By: Goyal, Raghav; Adjemian, Michael K.; Glauber, Joseph; Meyer, Seth
The USDA publishes monthly ending stocks projections, providing an estimate of the end-of-marketing-year inventory of a particular commodity. By comparing these projections of balance-sheet variables against their realized values from marketing years 1992/3 to 2019/20, we decompose ending stocks forecast errors into errors of the other supply and demand components. Our results indicate that export and production misses are the key contributors to projection errors. We likewise investigate US export errors. Our results make a strong case that better information about production expectations, both domestically and worldwide, will contribute to more efficient agricultural balance-sheet forecasts.
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May, 2023

I Say Milk, You Say Mylk: Substitution Patterns and Separability in a Broadened Milk Category

By: Ghazaryan, Armen; Bonanno, Alessandro; Carlson, Andrea
This study tests the assumption of weak separability between demand for dairy and nondairy milk products by using food scanner data from 2012 to 2017 and estimating linear-approximate EASI demand systems. Our results show that the weak separability structures can be rejected. First, this finding shows that nondairy milk products compete with dairy milk for consumersÕ budget allocated to milk. Second, although milk demand studies often do not include nondairy milk, or assume weak separability, the exclusion of these productsÑor the separability assumptionsÑmay lead to biased estimates.
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May, 2023

Learning about Our Vices from Devices: A Model of Individual Learning with an Application to Consumer Food Waste

By: Qi, Danyi; Roe, Brian E.; Apolzan, John W.; Martin, Corby K.
We formulate an empirical learning model suitable for understanding individual behavioral responses in such environments. We estimate this model using data collected about the joint personal decisions of food selection, intake, and waste during a study in which users photographed their meal selections and plate waste over the course of a week with a cell phone. We found a substantial learning-by-doing effect in plate-waste reduction: Those who document greater plate waste in their captured photographs waste less on subsequent days. Further, we identified that participants reduced plate waste by learning to eat more rather than by learning to reduce the amount of food selected.
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May, 2023

Mitigating Risky Conservation Tenders: Can an Insurance Mechanism Be a Solution?

By: Olita, Harriet Toto; Schilizzi, Steven G. M.; Iftekhar, Md Sayed
The cost of providing environmental goods and services by private landholders is often highly uncertain. However, standard bidding models for conservation tenders often ignore this uncertainty. As a result, they fail to suggest suitable mechanisms to reduce the negative impact of cost uncertainty. We contribute to this knowledge gap by developing an optimal bidding model for a risky and budget-constrained tender in the presence of an embedded insurance mechanism, offering income protection. Results from our analysis show that, relative to uninsured landholders, landholders paying an actuarially fair premium tendered lower bids, potentially improving the cost effectiveness of allocating conservation contracts.
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May, 2023

Effect of Conservation Practice Adoption on Perceived Changes in Farm Outcomes in South Dakota

By: Obembe, Oladipo S.; Wang, Tong; Shew, Aaron M.
This paper uses farm survey data from the western margin of the Corn Belt to estimate the causal effects of adopting different conservation practices---conservation tillage (CT), cover cropping (CC), and diversified crop rotation (DCR)---on perceived changes in yield, production cost, and profit among farmers in South Dakota. We use propensity score kernel matching to correct the sample selection bias induced by nonrandom adoption of different conservation practices. We find that compared with non-adopters, farmers who adopt CT and DCR are more likely to perceive an increase in profit and yield and CC adopters are less likely to perceive a production cost increase.
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May, 2023

Beer Excise Taxes and the Craft Beverage and Modernization Tax Reform Act

By: Brester, Gary; McCullough, Michael; Atwood, Joseph; Austin, Caroline Graham
In December 2017, the Craft Beverage and Modernization Tax Reform Act (CBMTRA) lowered federal beer excise taxes for a period of 2 years, and the Taxpayer Certainty and Disaster Tax Act of 2020 made the reduction permanent. We evaluate the ramifications of the CBMTRA on producers, consumers, and tax receipts and quantify potential differential effects among the micro, regional, and macro brewing sectors. Although the excise tax reduction was supposed to primarily support the micro brewing sector, we find that the CBMTRA provided a larger combined benefit to the regional and macro brewing sectors.
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May, 2023

Disentangling Short-Run COVID-19 Price Impact Pathways in the US Corn Market

By: Gao, Yixuan; Malone, Trey; Schaefer, K. Aleks; Myers, Robert J.
Using a data-modified version of the relative-price-of-a-substitute method, we distinguish the consequences of the sharp decline in US automotive fuel demand from the consequences of nonethanol demand changes in the US corn market. Our results suggest thatÑdue to the renewable fuel standard and ethanol-gas price linkagesÑthe COVID-19 pandemic affected corn markets more than it affected other agricultural commodities. The onset of the pandemic reduced Illinois cash prices for corn by approximately 18%. The majority of this impact (approximately 16%) was driven by pandemic-induced reductions in ethanol demand. Ethanol-driven and total impacts were greater in locations farther from terminal markets.
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May, 2023

Carbon and Timber Management in Western Oregon under Tax-Financed Investments in Wildfire Risk Mitigation

By: Rossi, David; Kuusela, Olli-Pekka
We examine how forest taxation should be designed when tax revenues are used to finance expenditures on wildfire risk mitigation and when forest carbon storage has value. A model is solved sequentially in two stages by a forest tax planner and a representative private landowner. The planner considers two forest tax instruments currently used by state agencies in Oregon: 1) a per acre land tax, and 2) a unit tax on timber harvest. A numerical representation of the model shows that the optimal tax rates depend on whether private landowners are compensated for stored carbon. Our results show that neither the acre-based fee or a harvest tax is able to incentivize the same levels of sequestration as a carbon price. However, a neutral tax like the acre-based fee is preferred when the external benefits of carbon sequestration are captured by the private landowner.
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