This study investigates determinants of private capital formation in Greek agriculture and tests the “complementarity” against the “crowding out” hypothesis using multivariate cointegration techniques and ECVAR modeling in conjunction with variance decomposition and impulse response analysis. The results provide evidence of a significant positive causal effect of government spending on private capital formation, thus supporting the “complementarity” hypothesis for Greek agriculture.

Three farm programs to increase support by $6 billion per year are analyzed. Higher marketing loan (ML), higher AMTA payments, and Modified Supplemental Income (SIP) program are evaluated at the sector and farm levels. At the sector level impacts on supply, demand, and price are modest with acreage shifts of less than two million acres. At the farm level SIP was preferred by cotton farms and higher ML was preferred by farms producing soybeans. Higher AMTA payments were preferred by 3 of 11 farms. Overall, SIP was ranked first or second by 10 of 11 representative farms.

This article provides additional empirical evidence concerning the choice of the mule as the dominant draft animal in southern agricultural production in the latter 19th and early 20th century. While the mule was uniquely suited to the crops and climate of the region, two divergent arguments have been presented as to why the mule was the dominant draft animal in southern agricultural production. This research reevaluates these arguments and provides evidence that it was, in fact, the characteristics of this hybrid that made it the preferred draft animal for the South.

The amount of land in urban and other special uses increased more than 50 percent since the 1960s in the South. Rural land converted to urban uses is directly related to increases in population in the South. Urban land-use coefficients were estimated to provide a measure of the amount of land converted to urban uses per person added to the population base. These coefficients indicate that from 1974 to 1987 two-thirds to three fourths of an acre of land was converted to urban uses for each person added to the population base. At this rate, about 12.6 million acres are expected to be converted to urban use in the South during the next two decades.

This study provides insight into the seasonality of Class I price differentials in the southeastern dairy industry. This is accomplished by analyzing monthly estimates of Class I price differentials obtained from the imputed price solution or dual solution of a generalized capacitated minimum cost network flow model of the dairy industry. A smooth seasonal pattern emerges through the monthly sequence with the lowest and highest estimated Class I price differentials occurring in April and September respectively. Miami and Jacksonville areas reach $ 5.40 and $ 4.36 per hundredweight in April and $ 6.79 and $ 5.53 per hundredweight in September.

Several developments in recent years related to the use, valuation, and management of natural resources provide the motivation for this paper. First, increased urbanization during the economic boom times of the 1990s has led to acceleration of the conversion of natural and undeveloped areas to unnatural and built-up areas in many regions of the nation. As a result people concerned about the loss of nature and various associated benefits in their communities are pushing for public action to protect remaining natural and undeveloped areas. The push for these protective actions sets the stage for conflicts with other people who support continued allocation of natural and undeveloped areas to various types of urban-related development. Insight into the resolution of such conflicts can be gained through a better understanding of how natural capital contributes to quality of life in different regions.

Conflicts among competing resource users have become more frequent in the Southeast. Political and legal processes and economic values will play major roles in negotiations to resolve competing resource uses. Resource economists can contribute to resource conflict resolution in several ways, such as facilitating negotiation, asserting importance of institutional mechanisms, analyzing incentives, and evaluating resources.

This article seeks to demystify the competitive grant recommendation process of scientific peer review panels. The National Research Initiative Competitive Grants Program (NRICGP) administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Cooperative State Research, Extension, and Education Service (USDA-CSREES) serves as the focus of this article. This article provides a brief background on the NRICGP and discusses the application process, the scientific peer review process, guidelines for grant writing, and ways to interpret reviewer comments if a proposal is not funded. The essentials of good grant writing discussed in this article are transferable to other USDA competitive grant programs.

While it probably is not possible to cover comprehensively all the major resources issues in the South as we more into the 21st century, these three papers, taken together, give us a fairly good glimpse at some of the resource issues likely to dominate discussion in the next decade.

These three papers together characterize trends in land use, resource issues, and research responses that are being observed in all regions of the country. However, southern states are the locus of the most recent and rapid changes in land use. The latest National Resources Inventory data shows that the increase in acreage of land in developed uses from 1992 through 1997 was most pronounced in the southern states. Figure 1 compares, for all states but Alaska, the average annual rate of land development (this is land moved into the urban and built-up category and the rural transportation land category) between 1992 and 1997. Eight of the top 13 states are in the southern region, and Louisiana, the southern state with the lowest rate of land development, is ranked at 29th out of 49.

The paper discusses the linkages between the “globalization” of agricultural markets over recent decades and the decisions being made by individual farmers and ranchers in the United States. It is noted that technological advances lead to globalization of agricultural commodity markets and profit pressures. The continuing profit squeeze in agricultural production is having a significant effect on the cropping choices of America's farmers. When possible, acreage is being shifted out of low-revenue-generating crops and into higher-revenue-generating crops. This shift makes crop portfolios more risky over time, thus encouraging farmers to consider diversifying out of agriculture.

Commercial farmers remain a primary political force in support of publicly-supported research and educational programs to create productivity gains in crop and livestock production. Have the technical productivity gains brought about by both public and private sector research and educational efforts improved the well being of American farmers? A great number of agricultural scientists believe that they have. Studies have attempted to provide estimates of the internal rate of return and benefit/cost ratios for agricultural research and education. The vast majority of these studies estimate a quite favorable internal rate of return and a high productivity for public-sector agricultural research (Huffman and Just, p. 828). But these studies have focused on rates of return to agricultural research and education for society as a whole, without attempting to determine if these gains accrued to farmers, consumers, or perhaps the agribusiness firms who purchase raw farm commodities from farmers or sell them inputs.

The issues raised in this paper session—concerning technical change, globalization, and chronic low returns in agriculture—are of long-standing importance in our profession. The papers, like many policy discussions in our discipline, have focussed largely on the U.S. agricultural sector. In this comment I will make some remarks relative to the domestic situation, but would also like to branch out a bit to address the worldwide impact of changing technology and increasingly open markets.

Both Blank and Debertin start from the premise that technology increases agricultural productivity. As a result, supply increases faster than demand, driving down commodity prices and returns to factors used in agricultural production. Blank emphasizes how farmers respond to this situation by moving to higher risk, higher return commodities until eventually graduating out of agriculture entirely. These changes are accommodated by globalization which allows low-cost imports to substitute for abandoned agricultural production in the U.S. Debertin focuses on the contention that price depressing gains in productivity are due, in part, to publicly-supported agricultural research at Land Grant universities.