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 1997 merger of two USDA agencies, the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service and the Farmers Home Administration, into the Farm Service Agency created a need for consistent finance training. A highly successful Penn State Cooperative Extension borrower training program was...

Construct validity is concerned with the consistency of empirical measures with theoretical relationships. This paper reviews and extends the theoretical relationship between averting costs and willingness to pay. Measures of these two theoretical constructs with empirical averting costs savings...

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...