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...

This paper describes research to create a national database of switchgrass supply as part of the biomass program launched by the Department of Energy. The paper provides an estimate of county level switchgrass yield data for the state of Oklahoma. The estimates are made for the top five most...

The Renewable Fuel Standard mandate in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires 16 billion gallons out of 36 billion gallons of ethanol be produced from cellulosic feedstocks in 2022, but the mandate was apparently enacted without critical assessments of the agricultural impacts...

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...

According to the Executive Order 12866, a qualitative and quantitative assessment for any Federal mandate resulting in annual expenditures of $100 million or more is required. This study determines how many of the approximately 34.5 million acres of CRP land is brought back in economic use, how...

The conservation compliance provision of the 1985 Food Security Act requires farmer to implement conservation plans on highly erodible croplan as a prerequisite for elegibility in agricultural commodity programs Reducing erosion to the soil loss tolerance level on about 46 million highly...