High natural gas prices have agricultural producers searching for alternative energy sources for irrigation. The economic feasibility of electric and hybrid (electric/wind) systems are evaluated as alternatives to natural gas powered irrigation. Texas Panhandle and Southern Kansas farms are...

Sustaining natural resource stocks especially those underpinning the capacity to produce food is key to most definitions of sustainable development. Yet troubling evidence has surfaced of instances where the rural poor were forced to sacrifice long-term sustainability for the sake of near-term...

Six irrigation systems are analyzed considering cost and potential water savings. The investment cost of furrow and drip is $115,800 and $260,120, respectively. The cost of quarter mile pivot ranges from $59,000 to $64,000. Per ac-in variable pumping cost ranges $9.96 to $14.86 assuming natural...

Witnessing a rapid surge in irrigation requirements as well as the pressure on natural resources to augment production for satisfying grain demand for the growing human and livestock population, ground water supply in the Texas Panhandle reflects itself as a limiting yet indispensable factor....

This paper adopts a real options framework to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of four types of subsidies that aim to encourage a socially desirable land use under return uncertainties and costly reversibility of land use change. We first present a land conversion model to show how the subsidies...

This paper introduces a spatial bioeconomic model for study of potential cellulosic biomass supply at regional scale. By modeling the profitability of alternative crop production practices, it captures the opportunity cost of replacing current crops by cellulosic biomass crops. The model draws...