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This report is the inaugural edition in a series examining annual developments in U.S. agricultural policies, focusing on policies related to production agriculture, agrofood value chains, and food and nutrition assistance. U.S. agricultural policies are designed to address multiple objectives—including providing an income safety net for agricultural producers, minimizing negative environmental impacts of agricultural production, ensuring agricultural supply chains are equipped to provide adequate quantities of safe food to consumers, and helping address food and nutrition insecurity among vulnerable populations. Different policy tools are used to meet these objectives—including cost share, direct payments, provision of credit, or access to services. Policy developments in 2021 continued to respond to the ongoing impacts of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and extreme weather. Other policy developments in 2021 were aimed at updating certain risk management tools, addressing the impacts of climate change, and supporting improved equity in access to farm programs and outreach to under-served communities.

Nepal has spent about six decades on fruit development and research in different species. Fruit breeding particularly local and exotic germplasm collection started after 1950s and has gained momentum after the formation of commodity programme in 1972 AD. Major researches in the past were focused on indigenous and exotic genotype collection, evaluation, selection, propagation protocol standardization and adoptive trials. Some good ground works have already been done in major fruits such as apple, pear, plum, persimmon, kiwifruit, citrus, litchi, guava, pomegranate, walnut, papaya, banana and mango. The major public institutions involved in fruit breeding are Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC) following Agriculture and Forestry University. Some of the private nurseries like Everything Organic Nursery, Kavre and Technology Demonstration Centre of ICIMOD, Lalitpur were also involved in introduction and maintenance of indigenous and exotic fruit species. National Centre for Fruit Development, Kirtipur; Tropical Region Horticulture Centre, Nawalpur; Temperate Horticulture Farm, Satbanj, and Horticulture Farm, Marpha collected many local and exotic fruits and maintained at field gene bank. Horticulture Research Station, Rajikot has introduced 25 spur type apple cultivars and maintained in field gene bank. National Citrus Research Programme, Paripatle has introduced, collected and maintained 130 genotypes including exotic and indigenous landraces of citrus. Two varieties of acid lime ‘Sunkagati-1’ and ‘Sunkagati-2’ have been released and one variety ‘Terhathum Local’ has been registered. ‘Khoku Selection’ of mandarin orange has also been registered. Banana varieties 'Malbhog', 'Willium Hybrid' and 'G9' has been selected by participatory varietal selection and registered. To strengthen fruit breeding in the nation, NARC needs to be restructured with special focus on fruit researches. Establishment of national fruit commodity programs along with establishment of Tropical Fruit Research Station in Province 2 and Temperate Fruit Research Station in Province 5 at national level can streamline NARC's fruit breeding researches.

The 2018 farm bill is the latest in a history that dates to 1933. Commodity assistance is the only program in all farm bills, but with evolutionary changes. Current farm commodity programs largely make payments to farms, a stark contrast to the 1930s when they limited supply, put a floor under market price, and dampened price increases via public stocks. Crop insurance, which began as an experimental pilot program in 1938, now has its own farm bill title. Almost all commodity and insurance programs have provided assistance based on a calculation specific to an individual commodity's price and/or yield. However, an evolutionary change to whole farm commodity programs may be in its infant stages. They provide assistance for variation in a farm's aggregate revenue across multiple crops. Whole farm experiments currently exist in both the commodity and crop insurance titles. Analysis of a whole farm commodity program finds that its payments differ by year from actual payments made by current commodity programs and are smaller in total.

We analyze the effects of Price Loss Coverage (PLC), Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC), individual revenue protection insurance (RP), and Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO) on the RP coverage level, certainty equivalent, and program payments. The model is calibrated to a representative wheat farm in Mitchell County in Kansas to analyze the effects of various policies. The result highlights that when insurance is framed as an investment, cumulative prospect theory predicts farmers’ coverage decisions accurately at 70%. ARC or PLC program increases the RP coverage level to 75%, but PLC and SCO jointly decrease the RP coverage level to 70%.

The Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM) recommends that Congress increase funding for fruit and vegetable production and intake in The Farm Bill reauthorization. Analysis of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's databases indicates that the availability of fruits and vegetables in the food supply is at half or less than half of what is needed to meet federal dietary recommendations for Americans. Based on the extant literature, SBM supports including funding allocations for fruit and vegetable production, including fruits and vegetables in commodity programs, providing additional insurance subsidies for producing fruits and vegetables, and maintaining or increasing funding for initiatives that promote fruit and vegetable intake. To avoid some of the unintended consequences of increasing support for fruit and vegetable production, new insurance products should be developed in collaboration with groups representing fruit and vegetable producers.

Research priorities for the U.S. farm economy include increasing the productivity and cost efficiency on current land resources while understanding production agriculture across the globe. Providing unbiased objective analysis to policymakers with regard to commodity programs, insurance markets, agricultural credit, and the production of bioenergy are important issues that directly affect not only the U.S. farm economy but other agricultural regions. The ability to manage risk, the increasing complexity of farm operations, the ability of the U.S. farm sector to be nimble to changes in individual and societal preferences, and the efficient discovery of information through efficient markets offer a wealth of research opportunities.

This study uses an updated version of the U.S. Agricultural Resource Model (USARM)—a multi-region U.S. agricultural sector programming model—to examine effects of climate change mitigation policies on U.S. water resources. One scenario considers effects of increasing prices of energy and energy-intensive inputs (primarily fertilizers) through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program. A second scenario combines the first scenario with an agricultural offset program where farmers are paid to retire cropland for carbon sequestration. The consequences of climate mitigation policies for agricultural water use and pollution control have received relatively little attention in part because—unlike USARM—many national agricultural sector models do not explicitly include water as an input. USARM also allows for input substitution among seven inputs in a CES framework, while accounting for all major crops as well most specialty crops, federal commodity programs, and crop exports. Major results are as follows. First, climate mitigation policies have scope to significantly reduce agricultural water use. Whether domestic offsets are included has little effect on the total amount of water conserved, but has a large effect on which parts of the country the conservation takes place. Second, either carbon taxes or cap-and-trade combined with domestic offsets combines two policies often modeled as potential solutions to the hypoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico—increased fertilizer prices and land retirement. Climate policies may have unanticipated, near-term, environmental benefits by addressing the hypoxia problem. Third, while domestic offsets reduce total fertilizer and agricultural chemical use, they increase their use per acre. Particularly in watersheds with significant land retirement, there could be unintended intensive margin effects where fertilizer and chemical use are increased. Despite this last, cautionary finding, a key insight into decision makers is that climate policies can have unanticipated, near-term benefits of water pollution control and water conservation that could be included in benefit-cost analyses of climate policy proposals.

In this study a crop sector model for the United States was constructed. A theoretical framework incorporating agricultural producers decisions on whether to comply with the volunteer commodity programs was developed. Unlike previous studies, policy variables are directly incorporated in a structural framework. A multioutput-multiinput technology in a dual framework was used for the present study. Crop supply and input demand equations were derived from a normalized quadratic profit function. The crop sector module consisted of thirteen crops (wheat, rice, corn, other coarse grains, soybeans, hay, cotton, peanuts, flaxseed and sunflower, sugarcane and sugarbeet, tobacco, vegetables, and fruits and nuts), four variable inputs (land, fertilizer, operating capital, and labor) and one fixed input (durable farm machinery);Thirteen product supply and four variable input demand equations were estimated simultaneously using full information maximum likelihood methods maintaining all the theoretical restrictions. Additionally, commodity program participation rates equations, as implied by the theoretical model, were econometrically estimated. This combination of microeconomic theory and structural policy implementation represent a contribution to the areas of applied production analysis and quantitative policy analysis. Empirical results are very encouraging and consistent with the theoretical model. The elasticity estimates are within a reasonable range. Results further indicated that microeconomic theory can be fruitfully combined with structural policy representations to yield a crop sector module that can be used for policy evaluation in a general equilibrium analysis.

U.S. Government commodity programs have both direct and indirect effects on farmers, consumers, and taxpayers, and play a leading role in the U.S. agriculture. By some measures announced by U.S. Congress, agriculture receives more federal support relative to importance than any other sector of the economy. Specially, the U.S. rice industry is mostly influenced by the government policy because the rice industry is smaller than other grain industries;Export-oriented policies of Thailand can have dramatic consequences on the U.S. rice industry. Thailand, as the largest exporter and competitor against the U.S., has contributed to price and export variability in the U.S. rice market as well as in the world market;Furthermore, small swings in foreign demand for world rice market are important to analyze the U.S. rice industry because the U.S. rice industry heavily depends upon the world rice market, with more than 60 percent of national rice production as an outlet for exports;Under a Stackelberg duopoly assumption, Thailand as a price-leader and U.S. as a price-follower, an economic supply-demand model that represents economic forces acting in the U.S. rice industry was formulated. Then the effects of alternative policies of U.S. and Thailand, and world demand fluctuations of U.S. rice economy were examined by using this economic framework;Empirical study for 1960-1985 shows that an aggressive export policy of Thailand, an expansionary total production policy of major importers, and market-oriented policy of U.S. Government, might seem to hurt the rice farmers because of the lower farm price and supply, and hence loss of expected returns to rice farmers. Simulation result also shows that the Thailand export policy has much more significant impacts on the U.S. rice market than the U.S. support price policy and the expansionary production policy of major importing countries.

Section I. The impact of the U.S. wheat export enhancement program on the world wheat market. The U.S. Export Enhancement Program (EEP) was included in the 1985 U.S. Food Security Act with a major objective being to increase sales of U.S. agricultural commodities. Through the EEP, the U.S. government subsidizes exports of agricultural commodities to targeted importing countries. The EEP was applied to the majority of U.S. wheat sales in 1987/88 and 1988/89. Coincident with the 1985 act and EEP legislation, U.S. wheat exports have increased significantly. This study uses a nonspatial, partial equilibrium model of world wheat trade to analyze the impact of the EEP on U.S. wheat exports and share of world wheat trade. The study indicates that the effect of the EEP on the wheat market over the period 1986/87 to 1988/89 has been a large displacement of commercial wheat sales (87-92%), with export additionality due to the EEP being only 8-13%. The impact of the EEP on other exporters' wheat trade and importer demand has been small relative to the magnitude of total EEP sales;Section II. Export allocation and price discrimination policies under demand uncertainty. This paper investigates price discrimination policies for a large country disposing of a fixed quantity of output to a certain and an uncertain market. In addition to price elasticities of demand, risk is an important reason for price discrimination. A risk neutral government sets a higher price in the uncertain market than under certainty, but the effect of increased risk aversion is ambiguous. When exports are allocated ex ante, the risk neutral exporter allocates more output in the riskless market than under certainty. The ranking of price and quantity setting policies for foreign disposal of surplus output is generally ambiguous;Section III. An analysis of producer participation in government commodity programs. Participation decisions for profit maximizing producers in voluntary agricultural commodity programs are modeled to investigate the importance of the heterogeneity of land attributes in the participation decision. The comparative static analysis of changes in program parameters on aggregate participation, acreage planted, and input use is completed for a corn-soybean producer. A corn program participation rate equation is estimated using county level data for Iowa that provides support for the hypothesis that heterogeneity of land quality is a significant determinant in the program participation decision.

Agriculture in the United States (US) has been the focus of a number of studies that address the link between on-farm agricultural practices and the degradation of natural resources. The mounting body of evidence that associates certain cropping and grazing practices with soil and waterway damage points to a need for federal agricultural policy to provide improved conservation incentives for agricultural producers. This study focuses on the first two years of the Conservation Security Program (CSP) in Iowa, a watershed based conservation program introduced with the 2002 Federal Farm Act. This new "green payment" program emphasizes "rewarding the best" stewards of natural resources and "attracting the rest" via reward payments and cost share incentives.;Previous studies of the CSP have been performed in a number of agricultural regions of the US including the Midwest corn belt. All have typically utilized only one research method such as interviews, focus groups, case studies or in-depth examinations of program spending. While collectively these studies have established the promise of the program as well as its limitations, this study provides a thorough examination of the CSP's implemnetation in Iowa, using an approach that combines a statisitically representative mail survey of producers in the state's first four CSP watersheds with 13 in-depth interviews in a complimentary manner.;Results are consistent with the findings of other studies, suggesting that the CSP is rewarding the "status quo" of corn, and soybean crop production in the state with little incentive for producers who have not invested previously in stewardship to improve their standards of conservation. There appears to be little to distinguish among CSP enrollees as program participants were found to be relatively homogeneous, with many already receiving payments through other conservation programs. CSP payments were found to be unevenly distributed among producers, with some probably being over compensated for the costs of their conservation which threatens program compliance with World Trade Organization (WTO) "green box" rules.;Rewarding producers for practices already in place is not lost on long term stewards, as enrollment in traditional conservation programs has typically allocated the highest payments to those practicing the least conservation. With the 2007 Farm Bill in mind, the effectiveness of the CSP at promoting and preserving natural resources could be greatly improved by capitalizing on the current period of high commodity prices by redirecting savings from Loan Deficiency and Counter-Cyclical payments into simplifying the CSP exclusively as a reward program for proven stewards. Additionally, conservation compliance for commodity programs should be improved and enforced so that the environmental benefits of producers practicing "land stewardship" is not undermined by producers unwilling to maintain conservation minimums. Promoting the CSP exclusively as a reward program should provide the needed incentive for unproven land stewards to take advantage of costshare programs such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to transition to higher levels of stewardship, increasing the overall acreage of conservation treatment in Iowa and reducing the total area of environmentally damaging practices.

In this study, I extended the stochastic model built by Babcock and Paulson (2012) to conduct a one-year cost projection for crop insurance in order to investigate its feasibility of being solely provided by private firms. Based on the 52 years’ yield data from 1961 to 2012, the risk consequences from insuring crop yield and revenue against losses are estimated to be far beyond what private insurers could bear on their own. However, reinsurance from the government provides an attractive incentive to insurance firms. Among the six insurance policies researched in this study, the minimum expected net underwriting gains to private firms with government reinsurance in 2013 was $289.9 million, which is about 9.30% of retained premiums. The maximum loss that firms could have borne in 2013 was $4.9 billion. In addition, the impact of a proposal to eliminate premium subsidy for the harvest price option is also estimated. The total savings for taxpayers are estimated to be $1.3 billion, which is about $400 million more than CBO’s estimate in 2013, but only 67% of its estimate in 2015.Based on the three-crop competitive storage model initiated by Lence and Hayes (2002), I also develop a better approach for a multiple-year cost projection by modeling the demand shock as a random walk. This approach is capable of preserving the correlations between national yields and prices, maintaining the relationships among national, county and farm yields, retaining the spatial correlations of yields across crops, and incorporating inter-temporal price correlations as well. More importantly, this approach is capable of simulating price draws with a desired volatility pattern: increasing over time but at a slower rate than square root of time t, as stated in Lence, Hart and Hayes (2009). Preserving these correlations and price-related features are crucial in conducting precise cost estimations and valid policy analysis. My analysis shows that the payments from Price Loss Coverage (PLC) with its time-invariant fixed guarantees would be significantly underestimated if both the price serial correlation and the increasing, concave price volatilities are ignored. For Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO), their guarantees are adjusted to reflect market conditions so the difference in estimated payments is modest. An easy fix for estimating the cost of PLC is to inflate the price volatilities used to generate random prices for budget scoring purposes.

Price forecasts are critical to market participants when making production and marketing decisions and to policymakers who administer commodity programs and assess the market impact of domestic or international events. With the exceptionally volatile conditions experienced in the corn market since 2006, the need for price forecasting has become even more critical. The purpose of this paper is to explore an alternative econometric procedure to forecast the season-average price of corn for U.S. producers, a relatively under-researched price forecast. The new method performs well against two widely-watched season-average price forecasts, i.e., the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates and the futures-based forecasts, in particular at the beginning of the post-harvest season. Additionally, the proposed forecast performs no worse or better than the futures-based forecasts at the beginning of the forecast cycle, as well as from November to August during the marketing year. We attribute the satisfactory performance of the proposed forecast to the model’s ability to assign heterogeneous weights to futures and cash prices depending on the underlying market conditions. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed forecast tends to improve when the market becomes more volatile.

This article assesses the political economy of the 2014 U.S. farm bill, with a focus on the farm support safety net. The farm bill secured substantial bipartisan majorities in a politically contentious Congress. Planned outlays are predominately for nutrition assistance programs directed toward a traditional nonfarm constituency in the farm bill coalition, while annual fixed direct payments to farmers are eliminated but replaced with enhanced downside risk protection against low prices or revenue. The new support programs may prove more or less costly than the foregone fixed payments, with farmers offered a choice between a price countercyclical program with increased reference prices and a revised moving-average revenue guarantee program. The role of insurance is enhanced, notably by replacing past support programs with a new upland cotton revenue insurance program and dairy milk-to-feed margin protection program. Open policy issues that are highlighted include the costs and distortionary effects of moving-average revenue benchmarks versus fixed reference prices, the overall level of insurance premium subsidies, the potential for overlap between commodity and insurance programs, and lastly, food, environmental, and biofuels concerns that reflect the diverse portfolio of products demanded from agriculture. In an international context, we conclude that the 2014 farm safety net likely would not have been enacted had multilateral agreement been reached on the 2008 Doha Round World Trade Organization negotiating documents. Conversely, the 2014 farm bill makes achieving those limits more difficult. Research is discussed that can elucidate the ongoing political economy of U.S. farm policy and help shape future program design.

Anthony (Tony) Bellotti’s career as a humanitarian and entomologist followed a trajectory that took him to El Salvador with the Peace Corps (PC) in 1962, New Mexico State for a Masters, Paraguay (again with the Peace Corps), Cornell University for a Ph.D., and Colombia where he worked for the Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT) from 1974 until his passing in March 2013 in Naples, Florida. Tony became a passionate advocate of cassava, and one of the world’s pre-eminent authorities on the entomology of that orphan crop that sustains millions of the world’s poorest popula tions. Tony played a crucial role in one of the most often cited and successful examples of classical biological control, the introduction of a parasitoid wasp from Paraguay to control the cassava mealybug throughout a broad area of Africa known as the Cassava Belt. His career spanned a period of time that might be referred to as a golden age of commodity programs at the international “CG Centers” organized under the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which followed in the footsteps of Norman Borlaug and Robert McNamara, the unlikely alliance that led to the Green Revolution. Among Tony’s lesser accomplishments was his recruitment of the author to CIAT in 1986, where I worked on pests of tropi cal forages and then on cassava integrated pest management in northeastern Brazil and West Africa. Tony was a mentor and a friend whose career offers a chance to look at a unique life and his contributions to international agriculture.

Conservation Compliance ties eligibility for most Federal farm program benefits to soil and wetland conservation. To be eligible for farm program benefits, farmers must apply an approved soil conservation system on highly erodible cropland (Highly Erodible Land Conservation, or HELC) and refrain from draining wetlands (Wetland Conservation, or WC). Conservation Compliance is effective when the incentive—the farm program benefits that could be lost due to noncompliance—exceeds the cost of meeting soil and wetland conservation requirements. HELC significantly reduced soil erosion on highly erodible cropland and may have also encouraged erosion reduction on land not subject to HELC. Compliance incentives (farm program benefits) under the Agricultural Act of 2014 are found to (1) vary widely across farms with cropland in HEL (highly erodible land) fields, (2)approximate the overall level of incentive that would have been provided under an extension of the 2008 Farm Act (although incentives changed significantly on many farms), and (3) be significantly lower on many farms if crop insurance premium subsidies were not subject to Conservation Compliance. Compliance incentives for WC, although measured only in the Prairie Pothole region of the Northern Plains, are clearly larger than Compliance costs for an estimated 75 percent of wetlands that are already cropped or have characteristics (e.g., productivity, topography) that are favorable to crop production.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The 2014 Farm Bill required Kansas wheat producers to make a series of enrollment decisions that were both complicated and based on incomplete information. With this bill, producers were required to complete a one-time enrollment in one of three programs (ARC-CO, PLC, or ARC-IC) to serve as a safety net for poor crop prices and/or yields over the subsequent five-year life of the legislation. Analyzing the effects of incomplete information on producers’ decisions provides an opportunity to identify challenges associated with program selection under the 2014 Farm Bill and suggest changes for future farm support legislation. METHODS: Kansas county-level enrollment data for wheat base acres obtained from USDA-FSA are used to model aggregate producer sign-up decisions as a function of estimated 2014 payments, county-level yield variability, prior farm program enrollment, and extension programming efforts at the county and state level. This OLS model is subsequently replicated using individual producer data from surveys conducted during fifteen extension meetings held across Kansas. The model based on individual data is a regression of stated preferences for the three programs as a function of farm size, farmer demographics, risk preferences, and knowledge of the Farm Bill. RESULTS: Comparisons of model results from the aggregated enrollment data and the individual survey data offer greater insights into the factors affecting producer decisions. Specifically, aggregate enrollment decisions are primarily explained by expected payments for the first year of the program. For counties with a positive expected payment for 2014 under the ARC-CO program, enrollment in that program was higher. However, when the regression is repeated using individual data, other factors affect the enrollment decision such as the number of years a producer has been farming, the size of the farm, their membership in commodity associations, and their preferences for risk protection. CONCLUSIONS : The 2014 Farm Bill required producers to select participation in a single support program for the five-year life of the legislation. This decision had to be made without knowing exactly how crop prices and yields would behave in the future. It is important to understand how producers made their decisions based on incomplete information to inform future legislative efforts for an effective farm safety net. This research expands that understanding by analyzing both aggregate and individual data to determine the factors that influence program choice.

Government-issued agricultural subsidies are worsening obesity trends in America. Current agricultural policy remains largely uninformed by public health discourse. Although findings suggest that eliminating all subsidies would have a mild impact on the prevalence of obesity, a revision of commodity programs could have a measurable public health impact on a population scale, over time. Policy reforms will be important determinants of the future of obesity in America, primarily through indemnity program revisions, and the allocation of increasing amounts of resources to sustainable agriculture. Public health intervention will be required at the policy level to promote healthy behavioral changes in consumers. The 2013 Farm Bill will be the key mechanism to induce such policy change in the near future.

Introduction There is a wealth of literature suggesting that politicians provide political favors to parties that offer them financial contributions (Tripathi, Ansolabehere, and Snyder 2002; Becker 1983). Political Action Committees (PACs), for example, enable people to concentrate donations to further a common interest (van Doren, Hoag, and Field 1999; Taylor 2003). To the unfamiliar, "agriculture" might seem to be a group with common interests. Starting with Thomas Jefferson, and still supported by essayists like Wendell Berry, there is an "Agrarian Ideology" that romanticizes and protects a farm culture (Browne et al. 1992; Hamlin and Shepard 1993). However, one does not have to scratch very deep to see that there are disparate interests among its many constituents. Cattle and poultry producers, for example, may not prefer programs that prop up corn prices, and ethanol producers might support sugar embargos. Although there is strong evidence that PACs will allocate their contributions to buy access to politicians (Tripathi, Ansolabehere, and Snyder 2002), there is little evidence about whether agricultural PACs cooperate to buy the same things. On one hand, the nature of a PAC is to advocate a partisan interest, and the interests in agriculture can be diverse. "The Making of the 1996 Farm Act," for example, described several instances where interests conflicted (Schertz and Doering 1999). Commodity programs competed with each other, as well as food programs, for budget allocations, and cotton and rice interests were reluctant at first to agree to the Freedom to Farm legislation. Over the past few decades, livestock producers mounted little resistance to programs that boosted crop prices, even though they would have to pay more for feed and receive very little Federal support relative to crop producers. However, there are several reasons to believe that agricultural PAC's partisan interests might be limited by group values and beliefs. Experience has shown that cooperation has characterized country values (Castle 1995), and the Agrarian Ideology reconciles community values and self-interest as one in the same (Browne et al. 1992). Furthermore, Gardner (1995) and Pasour and Rucker (2005) argue that groups form coalitions to seek rents, especially in the case of agriculture where new interests, such as environmentalism, are growing. Hamlin and Shepard (1993) suggest that agricultural groups see the world as an "us (agriculture) versus them (everybody else)" struggle, suggesting a propensity to cooperate rather than compete. Finally, the Agrarian Ideology may persist because non-producers have little knowledge about agriculture, and those in agriculture have an incentive to promote a romantic image, again incenting cooperation. Lynne (2002) offers a construct that attempts to unify these observations into a single theoretical model based on relatively recent results in neuroscience and behavioral economics. (1) In this model, an agent is faced with two joint, non-separable interests: one generally representing privately-appropriable benefits ("what one wants to do"), and one representing a moral/empathetic/community dimension representing "what one ought to do" (Lynne 2002: 415). According to this model, agents are likely to resolve this conflict by choosing allocations that maximize neither "extreme," but rather satisfice in a manner consistent with overprovision of the public dimension from the standpoint of traditional neoclassical theory, while remaining rational. At the level of the individual, observed behavior tends to be consistent with such a theory (Bishop, Shumway, and Wandschneider forthcoming; Ovchinnikova et al. 2009; Chouinard et al. 2008). In the case of agricultural PACs, this model can be used to reconcile the finding of different subsectors pursuing alternative donation strategies while maintaining some adherence to the concept of the Agrarian Ideology. But which outweighs the other: one's partisan and/or personal interests, or an interest in the broader agricultural community? …

New revenue-based support programs in the 2008 Farm Bill represent a fundamental shift in farm programs and risk management decision-making. However, complexity, uncertainty, economics, and, arguably, an incomplete analysis of the new Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program all contributed to low enrollment in the new program in 2009. An effective analysis of ACRE should consider farm programs as part of an integrated risk management portfolio, including crop insurance, marketing, and other risk management tools as opposed to a separate lottery program. Improving this integration could be one of the most significant consequences of the 2008 Farm Bill.

We estimate the impact of government payments on United States land use, using county-level data from the National Resources Inventory and the Census of Agriculture in 1987, 1992, and 1997. Although payments were made under decoupled support programs, effects on land use are found to be significant. On average for the years studied, our simulations indicate that United States cropland acreage would have been 89 million acres (22%) less if program payments had been reduced to half their observed level (holding market prices of commodities constant). Percentage reductions are largest in marginal crop producing areas of the nation. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

Payment limits have played an important role in U.S. farm policy deliberations for the last thirty years. Current limits are largely nonbinding. Proposals to strengthen and enforce limits are currently in discussion. We evaluate the likely effects of such proposals on acreage for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice in several important producing states. Our results generally indicate that payment limits are unlikely to significantly affect acreage in most cases; exceptions occur for cotton and rice, where the probability that limits would be binding is much greater and thus more likely to affect production. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.

We examine how US farm policies for sweetener crops have affected the consumption and composition of sweeteners in the US diet. R&D expenditures have lowered the unit cost of commodities used in sweeteners, but have generated more technical progress in corn than in sugar crops, increasing use of corn in food production, ceteris paribus. Commodity programs have raised the price of sugar and decreased the price of corn. Thus, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) became an inexpensive substitute for sugar in food from 1970 on. However, the effect of policy on ingredient prices has become less important over time. Today the farm value share in sweetened food is below 5% and HFCS is a specialized input in many food items, with limited substitution possibilities. The current link between US sweetener consumption and farm policy is weak. Recent evidence from other high-income countries shows little relationship between sweetener consumption and sugar policies.

Moving from price-triggered to area revenue–triggered programs was perhaps the most common theme among 2007 farm bill proposals. Area revenue–triggered commodity programs may make farm-level revenue insurance products seem redundant, raising questions about why the federal government should continue both programs. Area revenue–triggered programs would remove much of the systemic risk faced by producers. As a result, private sector insurers may be able to insure the residual risk without federal involvement. This paper examines the effects of moving to area revenue–triggered commodity programs with a focus on public policy issues that would likely arise.

Since the New Deal era, the commodity title has been the major farm support program in US farm bills. Commodity programs have encouraged farmers to pursue specialized, monocultural, and input intensive production strategies that are increasingly viewed as unsustainable. Yet commodity programs remain politically resilient. As revealed in the farm payment limitation debate in the 2007 farm bill reauthorization process, political support for commodity programs is maintained through policy elasticity adaptations that combine new with old policy rationales. The recent extension of farm program support to producers of commodities that have not received benefits in the past poses a potential threat to existing commodity programs, as this legislation has institutionalized competition within production agriculture over the allocation and design of subsidies. This paper argues for renewed attention to the policy support mechanisms that undergird the conventional agrifood system in order to better understand alternative agrifood system possibilities and constraints.

O of the purposes of U.S. agricultural programs has been to support or stabilize farm incomes by mitigating the effects of low crop prices and yields. Commodity programs such as the counter-cyclical payment and Marketing Loan programs have provided benefits or made payments to producers of several major field crops when crop prices fall short of expected or target levels. At the same time, the federal crop insurance program has provided support that has focused on yield shortfalls but has increasingly included revenue coverage. Several proposals to reform U.S. commodity programs have received attention in the 2007 farm bill debate (American Farmland Trust; National Association of Corn Growers; USDA). Generally, these proposals would alter or replace commodity price programs with programs that would make payments when revenues, that is, prices multiplied by yields, fall short of expected or target levels (Coble, Dismukes, and Thomas). Interest in revenue as the basis for farm programs is not new. In 1983, a national-level revenue program was studied as a way to control federal outlays for commodity programs (CBO). In the early 1990s, a regional-level revenue program was analyzed as a way to mitigate the need for supplemental, ad hoc disaster payments (Miranda and Glauber). More recently, a county-level revenue guarantee program has been promoted as providing protection when it is needed while reducing the chances that annual payments would exceed domestic commodity support limits allowed under the World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture (Babcock and Hart).

U.S. farm commodity support programs encompass nearly three quarters of a century and three quarters of a trillion taxpayer dollars. One dividend from that effort is to learn lessons. Farm commodity programs have steadfastly maintained a primary objective of supporting the incomes of a relatively few producers of a relatively few commodities. Nonetheless, farm programs have not been static but have adapted to changing economic and political parameters. Changes in agricultural policy tend to coincide with extremes in the food supply–demand balance. Farm program income transfers leak from their intended beneficiaries to other asset owners. Economic rents, once institutionalized, retain political momentum that sustains the rents. The rise of pressure from the World Trade Organization to provide only non-market-distorting payments may challenge the continued viability of these lessons; however, the lessons also caution against discounting the extant political influence of the farm lobby. [EconLit N500, Q180]. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The term “cheap food policy” has frequently been used as a descriptor for US commodity programs by those who contend payments to farmers ultimately result in lower food costs for consumers. More recently, farm policy has been criticized for contributing to the obesity problem in the US by making large quantities of fattening foods widely available and relatively inexpensive. This paper econometrically evaluates the impact of direct government payments on the affordability of food in the US in the aggregate and across specific food groups. The models find direct payments do not significantly affect the affordability of food, either in the aggregate or across specific food groups.

This article provides an overview of mandated commodity programs in California, and summarizes and interprets existing evidence on their economic impacts. The analysis draws upon the recent book edited by the authors: The Economics of Commodity Promotion Programs: Lessons from California. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, April 2005. The book documents the institutional arrangements, summarizes the history of recent litigation, and presents the results of a number of benefit-cost studies of mandated commodity programs in California. The overwhelming conclusion from the studies reported in the article is that the programs have been very profitable for California's agricultural producers. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

This article assesses the political economy of the 2014 farm bill, which eliminated annual fixed direct payments but offers enhanced downside risk protection against low prices or declining revenue. The farm bill secured substantial bipartisan majorities in a politically contentious Congress. The countercyclical structure of U.S. support is reaffirmed and crop insurance is enhanced as a safety net pillar. Open policy issues include the distribution of benefits among crops, the design of multiple year support around moving-average revenue benchmarks versus fixed references prices, and questions related to crop insurance, including the overall level of premium subsidies. In an international context, we conclude the 2014 farm safety net likely would not have been enacted had multilateral agreement been reached on the 2008 Doha Round negotiating documents; conversely, the 2014 farm bill makes achieving those limits more difficult.

Current production practices in the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota involve use of extensive tillage and/or herbicides to control weeds. Given the erosion potential, environmental concerns associated with herbicides, and herbicide-resistant weeds, alternative cropping systems that mitigate these problems need to be assessed economically. Furthermore, the role that government commodity programs play in the adoption of more ecologically friendly cropping systems needs to be determined. We evaluated 8 years of yield data (1994–2001) from field plots near Fargo, North Dakota, to compare the economics of two alternative cropping systems, reduced-input (RI) and no-till (NT), to a conventional tillage (CT) cropping system. The RI system relies on a more diverse rotation of soybean (SB), spring wheat (SW), sweet clover (SC) and rye, and uses fewer herbicide and fertilizer inputs than CT or NT. Both NT and CT systems rotate SB and SW. We found that CT returns averaged over $47 ha−1more than NT during the study period. Because SC yield data were not available, the economic competitiveness of RI was calculated using break-even yields and returns for SC. Historical SC yields in Cass County, North Dakota were not statistically different from the break-even yields. However, when government program payments were considered, break-even returns for SC increased by about $15 and $18 ha−1and break-even yields by 0.44 and 0.52 MT ha−1for RI to compare with NT and CT, respectively. These results indicate that CT management offers greater economic return than either RI or NT and that government program payments impede adoption of more environmentally friendly cropping systems in the northern Great Plains.

The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act (‘Farm Bill’) of 2002 has modified the provisions under Title 1 (Commodity Programs) regarding commodity eligibility. Concurrently, potato producers in Maine have expanded their use of program crops as rotations in potato cropping systems. These changes could affect the economic viability of the potato cropping system. An economic simulation model using budgeting techniques that incorporate stochastic elements to measure risk was developed to evaluate profitability and income risk of four cropping systems with and without participation in the 2002 Farm Bill. The four systems modeled were barley-potato, canola-potato, corn-potato, and soybean-potato. Participation in the 2002 Farm Act's commodity support programs increases the profitability of each cropping system, ranging from $26.00/acre for canola-potato to $122.00/acre for corn-potato. The use of stochastic dominance criteria shows that participation is more risk-efficient than non-participation. Furthermore, ...

The economic environment of agricultural producers has been influenced by formal U.S. agricultural policy for more than seventy years. Among the first pieces of New Deal legislation proposed by incoming President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a farm program designed to address declines in crop prices and net farm income. Key features of the Agriculture Act of 1933 included mandatory price support for specified commodities, direct subsidy payments to farmers, and supply controls. Farm programs, once viewed as temporary and supplementary to agricultural earnings, are increasingly viewed as permanent and of major proportion. Gardner examined the relationships between U.S. farm commodity programs and U.S. farm structure, while others (see Sumner for concept, evidence, and implications) have examined farm programs and specific crops. Gardner (2002), and Weersink et al. analyzed the effects of farm program programs upon land values. These studies examined various aspects of agricultural policy including whether farm program payments have enhanced land prices and landowner wealth rather than the welfare of producers. While it would seem logical that revenueenhancing farm programs would increase land values, reliably estimating the magnitudes of farm program effects upon land values is an empirically challenging task. Both statistical and budgeting-based methodologies have been used to estimate the share of land prices generated by farm program payments. Statistically based studies are complicated by the fact that both real per acre crop receipts

any of the effects of invasive species occur in commodity markets affectedby agricultural programs and policies, such as price and income supports,crop insurance, and trade barriers. In this paper, we focus on how policies toexclude, monitor and control, or eradicate invasive species interact with otherpolicies. We present some general arguments, drawing on parallels in theliterature on farm program impacts on the returns to agricultural research, andsome preliminary results from a case study of citrus canker.