I found this paper to be quite interesting and thought provoking, which is the norm when Allan Schmid is involved. For years, he has provided our discipline with considerable intellectual stimulation. There is a lot of “meat” in the paper, and I will not be able to address all of it in the limited space. What I would like to do is (a) put this issue in the context I use in a graduate class to show where I think social capital fits in the standard economic concepts, and (b) emphasize some of Schmid's points.

This paper examines the impact of PST on the optimal production/marketing decisions of a grow-finish hog farm operation. The analysis evaluates PST from three angles: the feed efficiency effect, the leaner meat price effect, and the aggregate-supply-induced price effect. When limited to the feed efficiency effect only, the primary response to the new technology is to increase the animal turnover rate of the operation. When the leaner meat price effect is also included, marketing weight increases while turnover rate remains relatively unchanged. Additionally, if the increased aggregate supply depressed the market price by more than 10%, the benefits from improved feed efficiency and leaner meat will be completely dissipated. Aggregate price adjustments (reductions) of less than 10 percent maintained positive producer benefits resulting from improved feed efficiency and leaner meat.

Canadians enjoy the highest possible level of food safety. Despite this fact, there is a public perception and concern about the potential presence of chemical residues in foods and the possible presence of bacteria, such as salmonella and listeria.

Rural residents, particularly recent in-migrants, are often characterized by preferences for a tranquil rural lifestyle based on the attributes of an open countryside. A survey of residents of an isolated rural county in West Virginia was conducted to explore the proposition that recent rural in-migrants are more opposed to the growth of natural resource based activities which are detrimental to the rural countryside than are long-term residents of the County. The hypothesis was not supported, as both recent in-migrants and long-time residents strongly favored economic development of the County's natural resources over preservation of the natural countryside.

Each year various agricultural commodity groups spend millions of dollars advertising and promoting their respective products. Typically such “demand creating” attempts have been purported as a panacea for low producer returns despite their unevaluated performance records. Notwithstanding the magnitude of these promotional expenditures, the literature is scarce regarding the effect of advertising on commodity sales. Such knowledge would provide an invaluable input for promotion expenditure decisions and a means to evaluate the effects of advertising and promotion on economic surplus.

Agricultural development in both the United States and Australia has led to suboptimal levels of environmental degradation. While both countries face similar forms of agricultural environmental degradation, the different resource endowment and population distributions have resulted in a different incidence of the costs of these problems. Increasing demand for environmental services and better information on off-site damages have led to increasing demand for reform of agricultural, rural development, and environmental programs to eliminate biases against practices viewed as more environmentally compatible.

One option for the disposal of sewage sludge is land spreading, including application to private croplands. Land spreading may allow some of the sewage treatment costs to the municipality or county to be offset by farmers’ payments for sludge as a crop producing resource. This study investigates the conditions under which a market for sludge will emerge. A linear programming model of a profit maximizing corn for gain farm is formulated and the quantity of sludge available is parametrically varied to trace out marginal productivity curves under various situations. The results for Anne Arundel county, Maryland sludge show a range in value from 0–35 $/ton at application rates from 0–20 tons/acre/year for three years.

We analyze optimal budget allocations to acquire protected areas for carbon storage while balancing risk and return from protection under economic growth uncertainty in a local community. Our study is the first to explore how risk of uncertain economic growth affects cost of protected area acquisition using real estate values at the parcel level, enabling us to estimate the site-specific opportunity cost of carbon storage. The Pareto optimal trade-off frontier between the expected carbon storage benefit and its variance provides a continuum of risk-return combinations. The pattern of the trade-off relationship implies that risk mitigation is less costly in terms of foregone expected benefit when risk is higher than when it is lower. Our results also find that the difference in cluster-specific budget allocations between the strong economic growth scenario and the weak economic growth scenario subsequently decreases between the point of expected benefit maximization and the point of variance minimization. Our findings of optimal hectares of land for protected area acquisition for carbon storage and corresponding benefits and costs serve as an empirically informed knowledge base to help a local community prioritize acquisition of potential protected areas for carbon storage under economic growth uncertainty.

A long sustained belief that undeveloped natural resources constitute unproductive economic waste has recently been losing ground. Moreover, preserving a natural resource such as wetlands is not preserving something unproductive. On the contrary, the resource can often be considered as socially and economically productive in its undeveloped form. In other words, an unaltered natural resource has the potential of being productive in both material and non-material ways. In making a decision about preservation the relevant point is the social productivity of a resource in its preserved condition as compared to its social productivity in an altered condition.

During the past fifteen years, many changes have taken place in the curriculum of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Maryland. Twelve new courses have been added, ten courses dropped and a new non-thesis Master's degree developed since the 1963–64 academic year.

An econometric model of U.S. and Maine apple production and prices was estimated with ordinary least squares multiple regression. A Gauss-Seidel solution technique was used to examine the equation system goodness of fit and to forecast endogenous variable values. Results indicate that supply expansion in the U.S. and Maine will continue, but Maine's slower rate of increase will erode its market share. Apple prices for the U.S. and Maine are predicted to decline in real terms by the year 2000 if inflation rates exceed 3 percent annually during the period 1982 to 2000.

The current issues of landfill bans, groundwater contamination, waste-end taxes and source reduction of hazardous wastes have rekindled interest in a systems view of environmental management. While this recent interest is new, the basic concept is not. The physical Law of Conservation of Mass as embodied in materials or mass balance has underlain most residuals management research (e.g. Ayres and Kneese [1969]; Kneese and Bower [1979]). As society grapples with the complex problem of toxic and hazardous chemical residues and their distribution in the environment, mass balance is receiving renewed attention in the form of cross-media transfers. The focus of this renewed interest is the movement and transformation of residuals among environmental media (soil, air and water) after discharge. Our early public lessons in applied ecology taught us that the environment is a single integrated system and that there are frequently unintended consequences associated with the human use of that environment. The contemporary lessons from the identification and cleanup of uncontrolled hazardous waste sites under the “Superfund” program lends a new impetus to our reconsideration of these concepts.

The dwelling unit is often described as the focal point or hub in the delivery of a whole array of services to a household. It delivers “physical space … sanitary and cooking facilities …” and its geographic location provides access to a particular neighborhood and affects proximity and access to jobs, retail stores, public services, association with other people, and cultural and religious facilities. Thus, housing has a very important role in human resource development, and, subsequently, in economic growth and development. In general, housing plays an important role in the quality of life and living.

Impacts of alternative federal milk marketing policies which result in reduced fluid (Class I) milk prices were assessed using a simulation model of the U.S. dairy industry. Results indicated that milk production, farm milk prices and producer revenues were significantly reduced in the Southern and Northeast regions of the country under some options. The regional shares of total U.S. milk production were not significantly altered from those which would exist under a continuation of the current policy.

Agricultural problems associated with population growth have been analyzed in the Northeast for some time. The loss of cropland and the effect on agricultural output have been documented by Otte and Krause. In addition to the actual loss of agricultural land, changes in land-use, taxation and agricultural input infrastructure continue to be analyzed. Indeed, rural land-use policy researchers in the Northeast have provided national leadership for several institutional innovations, e.g. agricultural districts, transferable development right sales and differential assessments. The Conference on Rural Land-Use Policy in the Northeast held at Atlantic City in 1974 and the on-going regional research project, “Rural Land Use Policy in an Urbanizing Environment” attest to the continued research in this area.

Not too long ago, most decisions were made by men. Using the brain was considered “unfeminine,” and it was a rare woman who was acquainted with the intricacies of financial planning. Today, things are changing as more and more women realize that prudent action in money matters can mean the difference between a comfortable future and “just getting by.”

Farris and Padberg, Krenz, and Boxley have discussed different ways of projecting the distribution of firm sizes. Farris and Padberg utilize Markov chain analysis where transition probabilities were derived from observed changes in firm size for Florida citrus packing firms over a five-year period. Krenz, recognizing the difficulty of securing data with which to estimate transition probabilities, developed rules which could be used to derive transition probabilities from census data. Krenz applied this technique to the size distributions of North Dakota farms. Finally, Boxley applied a completely different technique to estimating farm size distributions in the United States. Boxley's technique involved fitting negative exponential functions to firm size distributions observed from census data. According to Boxley, these functions were sufficiently stable to permit estimation of future firm size distributions.

A five-year linear programming farm planning model, permitting the inclusion of nitrogen decay rates, was constructed to include the use of sewage sludge as a primary crop nutrient source. Twenty-two scenarios depicting various operating conditions were examined and maximized net farm incomes compared.

Although only a small percentage difference resulted between the highest and the lowest net revenues over the five-year period, given a variety of operating circumstances, those scenarios including the use of sludge yielded the highest net incomes. Nitrogen application restrictions were at their upper limits when sludge use was included in the optimal solution. The calculation of net present values, for the two sludge contents considered, provided value estimates compatible with the linear programming solutions.

Market structure has implications for research policies. The public sector reduced its support for technological change for poultry relative to beef and pork after poultry became integrated. However, market integration causes private sector research to be below the optimal level from society's perspective. In order to get the appropriate response from the private sector, the public sector should not reduce its support for technological change after market integration. Instead, the public sector should increase its support for research such as basic science that complements private sector research.