It is widely believed that public and private research and educational activities have led to rapid advances in the production of crops and livestock, making farmers far better off than they would have been had these technological advances not taken place. The cash receipts data for the postwar...

The effective delivery of computerized decision aids for policymakers who must deal with problems of economic development has been of increasing interest to both extension and research workers in rural development. This paper describes efforts recently completed at the University of Kentucky...

Innovation is essential for agricultural and economic development, especially in today’s rapidly changing global environment. While farmers have been recognised as one of the key sources of innovation, many studies on agricultural innovations continue to consider farmers as adopters of...

Transaction Cost (TC) economics is highly relevant to public policy issues, enabling exploration of the influence of institutional and organisational arrangements upon policy performance. As policies evolve, often becoming more multifaceted as they grow, so the associated transactions costs...

Where land is an extremely limiting factor, production is increased through intensive cultivation with two or more crops in a year. We found that 82 per cent of the operating crop land is under 2 or more crops. Soil fertility depletion is one of the main biophysical limiting factors for...

In this paper I first discuss the role of external capital constraints in limiting the ability of farmers to implement new technologies. Via a theoretical model, I illustrate the role of farm size in determining if a particular cost-reducing technology is implemented. I show that the cost...

It's time to take a close look at recent trends agriculture and in rural areas and speculate where these trends might lead. What are the important forces that will shape the future agriculture and rural areas in the 21st century? What are the implications of these forces on the programs that...