The majority of farm households in OECD countries earn more off-farm income than farm income, even including government payments. While this is a well recognized fact its implications for risk management have not been well recognized. Current efforts to reform farm support have focused on the...

The paper provides an overview of the treatment of risk in economics as a way to connect the concept of risk, as used by economists, to the concern of other social science disciplines with how the parallel concepts of vulnerability and resilience affect rural and regional development. These...

This is a new version of a series of color slides on social capital as presented at a conference on rural development presented in Tampa, Florida in 2004, and sponsored by the Southern Rural Development Center.

Farmland values have increased rapidly over the last decade in response to high incomes for crop farmers and inordinately low interest rates. Farmers have responded to these conditions by bidding up the price of good cropland. In addition, the long period of increasing land values, since the...