Climate change has the potential to drive transformations in natural resource access, availability, and use that will have significant, far‐reaching impacts worldwide, not only for those of us living today but also for future generations. As economists we are being called upon to assess the...

The control of pests by their natural enemies represents an important ecosystem service that maintains the stability of agroecosystems and has the potential to mitigate pest control costs both to private producers and to society. Extending the “"economic threshold”" concept, this paper...

Payment-for-Ecosystem-Services (PES) programs are gaining appeal as flexible approaches to inducing the voluntary provision of ecosystem services (ES). Farmers, who manage agricultural ecosystems, provide important nonmarket ecosystem services to the public by their choice of production inputs...

In order to test whether farmer training and farmer health risks determine adoption of Integrated Pest and Production Management (IPPM) in Zimbabwe, a Poisson regression model was developed. The empirical analysis uses measures of farmer awareness of IPPM practices, pesticide health risks, labor...

Sustainable agricultural research and education have gained acceptability within the land-grant system in less than a decade, an impressive change. Attitudes were changed by a set of forces which include lobbying by sustainable agriculture advocates, requests from farmers as a result of the...

Microeconomic studies often make two assumptions: 1) producers focus on profit maximization, disregarding "external" environmental and health costs; and 2) producers have full information about their production processes and markets. This study examines whether these assumptions are valid for...

As contractual agriculture expands, contract design offers a non-regulatory opportunity to reduce non-point source pollution. A risk programming analysis of seed corn contract designs illustrates a tractable empirical principal-agent model, and shows that grower risk preferences affect contract...

Links between poverty and natural resource degradation are examined in the context of soil erosion, fertility loss and overgrazing in the Peruvian Altiplano. Multiple regression analysis of 1999 farm survey data examines 1) what agricultural practices affect natural resource degradation, and...