This report examines evidence on the relationship between agricultural land-use changes, soil productivity, and indicators of environmental sensitivity. If cropland that shifts in and out of production is less productive and more environmentally sensitive than other cropland, policy-induced...

In recent years, the Federal Government has increased its emphasis on conservation programs that reward good stewardship on working farmland. This report examines the business, operator, and household characteristics of farms that have adopted certain conservation-compatible practices, with and...

Society has recently increased the value it places on the services that wetlands provide, including water quality improvements, flood control, wildlife habitat, and recreation. However, owners of wetlands are often unable to profit from these services because the benefits created are freely...

Among Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) participants, there is a distinction between farm households using the program to ease out of farming and those using the program to augment production receipts. We find evidence that factors other than crop or livestock revenue and environmental factors...

The main objective of this research is to propose a data-driven approach to estimate the amenity values of restoring urban forest landscapes at potential target sites. The approach allows establishing the overall price-driving time relationship between the amenity values attributable to both...

In recent years, direct payments—a type of farm commodity program payment—have made up a large share of Federal agriculture assistance that could be withheld from farmers who fail to comply with highly erodible land conservation (conservation compliance and sodbuster) or wetland conservation...