While agricultural land preservation programs seek to maximize the number of acres, to preserve productive farms, to preserve contiguous farms, and to preserve threatened farms, they are often evaluated solely on the number of acres preserved. Preserved parcels in four Maryland counties were...

The factors in uencing participation in both purchase of development rights and transfer of development rights farmland preservation programs are analyzed using data from a survey of agricultural landowners and from spatial data on individual farms collected using GIS for four Maryland counties....

Policy makers have turned to competition- based voluntary-enrollment programs as a cost-effective way to achieve preferred land uses. This paper studies bidder behavior in an innovative auction-based program in which farmers compete to sell and retire the right to develop their land. We derive a...

Given growing concerns about the loss of farmland in the US, governmental and nonprofit groups are seeking innovative, cost-effective methods to preserve lands that will elicit additional landowner participation. This article describes four innovative farmland preservation techniques and derives...

A framework is developed to analyze a spatially dependent economically significant pest problem emanating from a source and spreading via a carrier such as an insect. Transmission and/or source control to combat the pest or disease problem are explored. Alternative assumptions about the...

Nearly half of all seasonal farm workers migrate at least 75 miles in a given year. An expected earnings differential from migration weakly induces migration: a 10% earnings differential raises the probability of migrating by slightly more than 1%. This result indicates that there are...