Horticulture – Page 53 – Naturehydro Horticulture Grow

The implications of the above shifts of policies for agricultural development are not clear

International experience shows that in the long run, increased foreign participation in the financial sector will have a positive effect on country’s development as a whole. However, in the period immediately following its WTO accession and the removal of protective measures in the financial sector, China may face one of its biggest challenges. There is a good possibility that the nation’s banks will suffer financially. Hence, it might be expected, the leader’s policy response to reform the current banking system will be a strong one. For example, financial sector officials are already mandating the government interventions fall, state banks recapitalize themselves, and nonperforming loans be transferred to asset management companies.While one might think the agricultural sector and poor regions in the rural economy could suffer from liberalization, it is not clear if things will be worse than before the reforms. In the past, agriculture in China was squeezed. Huang and Ma have shown how the financial sector has systematically shifted funds away from faming. Throughout the entire reform period, there was a net capital outflow by means of the financial system. Hence, it is hard to see how a reformed banking sector will treat agriculture any worse. Though,flood and drain table the experience of other countries most likely mean that in the short run small, poor farmers will be rationed out of financial markets.

Tax reform also is underway. In 2001, there were three major types of taxes levied on products and services: a VAT levied on goods and services for processing, maintenance and assembling; a Consumption Tax levied on some selected consumer products; and a Business Tax on services and the sales transaction involving assets . Both the VAT and Consumption Tax are applied to imported goods. Tax laws, however, have offered producers several exemptions. In many cases, part or all of the VAT is reimbursed when the goods is exported. All goods to be exported are not subject to the Consumption Tax. Although subject to a number of technicalities, there is some concerns are some of these tax rebates may not be consistent with the requirements of the 1994 GATT rules. Since, China has agreed that it would ensure that its laws, regulations and other measures relating to internal taxes would be in full conformity with its WTO obligations, some adjustments may have to be made. Perhaps the best example of this may be in the area of the assessment of the VAT on agricultural imports and the possibility that such an act may violate the national treatment clauses of the WTO accession agreement. Specifically, while the VAT is charged in full at the border for all imports . Although some observers in China have tried to argue that since farmers in rural areas already pay high land- and head-taxes, they can fairly be exempt, such a tax is not commodity specific and such unequal taxation of imports and domestically procured crops almost certainly violates WTO. If such a tax policy is challenged, China will have two options: assess the VAT on all domestic procurement or eliminate the VAT at the border on agricultural goods. More generally, as China attempts to make it economy more competitive in a post accession world, it has announced that in some areas it will lower taxes. The primary objective would be to lower the burden of domestic enterprises and attract new foreign investment. Tax cuts would also increase the competitiveness of its domestic products in the international markets.

Moreover, tax officials also have plans to continue to push on tax reform that shift China from a system that primarily uses a production-based tax system to a more consumer oriented tax regime. While desirable, it should be noted that the timing of implementing this tax reduction necessarily will depend on the impacts that the reform would have on the government’s revenue-earning capacity. An official from the State Council recently claimed that a major move to realign China’s tax system towards a more consumer-oriented one may begin as soon as 2003. To make the rural economy more competitive and to remove a set of institutions that have historically caused a lot of frustration among rural residents, officials have also begun to experiment with rural tax reform. The most bold experiment to date is based on a movement that seeks to “convert fees into taxes.” The earlier experiments began in Anhui province in 2000. The reform was implemented to reduce the burden of various fees imposed on farmers to a maximum level of 5 percent of the income of farmers. By reducing the tax burden of the farmer, officials hope to reduce the cost of agricultural production, since many fees are collected from farmers by local government and village committee on the basis of their sown area or level of livestock production. Originally, it was planned to extend this reform from Anhui to the rest of China within several years after the start of the experiment. The State Council hoped to spread Anhui’s rural tax reform in one third of all provinces in 2002. However, recent problems with the system have appeared in Anhui. Although fees and taxes have been reduced, the fall in local revenues have limited the ability of the local government to implement a number of basic mandated expenditures, including the support of schools, health systems, and basic infrastructure maintenance. Recent government pronouncements have actually put the Anhui experiment on hold.

It is likely that successful implementation of such a policy will require substantial reforms in other areas and a basic change in the way that government fiscal resources are shifted to poor areas to support basic services.In one of its most fundamental concessions , China agreed to phase out its export subsidies in the first year of WTO accession. Such subsidies have played considerable roles in assisting with the export of maize, cotton, and other agricultural products into international markets and in this way indirectly supporting domestic prices. In fact, after phasing out export subsidies, several of China’s sectors will likely be subject to much intensive competition from imports. Besides the elimination of export subsidies—which are “Red Box” investments, WTO also puts strict controls on the types and amounts of certain investments. In particular, domestic support to agriculture is divided into “Green Box” and “Amber Box” ones. As is the case with other WTO members, China faces no limitations in the amount that the nation can invest into those activities classified as Green Box, but face carefully circumscribed rules regarding the amount that can be invested into those activities listed as Amber Box policy. Hence, WTO will most likely force China to shift the composition of their investment portfolio. In planning their Amber Box investments, China accession protocol allows a de minimis level of investment that is equal to 8.5 percent of agricultural gross value product. After intense negations this level was set somewhat below that enjoyed by other developing countries but above that allowed to developed countries . Moreover, the list of items that are used to in the computation of China’s AMS is wider than that used by other countries. For example, certain investment subsidies are not counted in the computation of AMS in developing countries. Developing countries also frequently can classify input subsidies for poor farmers as Green Box investments. Hence, on paper, China’s hands appear to be quite firmly tied in the scope of the investments that they are able to make after their WTO accession. However, when one begins to add up the amount of fiscal funds that China has historically invested in these areas, it may be that the de minimis limits will not be binding.The biggest impact could be sometime in the future after China grew and its budget constraint was somewhat relaxed. At that time, however, China’s agreement should be thought of as fairly limiting as it closes future options to support its rural areas in ways that its neighbors in East Asia have done . In a post-WTO environment, China’s leaders will give more thought to how it can best use its de minimis budget. Most recently, a study by Huang and Rozelle shows that although most labor intensive agricultural commodities,rolling bench such as livestock and horticulture, had negative NPRs in late 2001, the time just prior to China’s WTO accession, many land intensive products, including maize, wheat, oil seed crops and sugar, had NPRs ranging from 5 to 40 percent. Moreover, the crops with the positive NPRs are almost all under TQR management, a finding that has important implications how China may want to use its scarce AMS funds. Instead of continuing to support or subsidize these products, China may want to promote these crop productions through productivity enhanced investment measures, such as more agricultural research or transportation and communication investments. Since many of such investments have long gestation periods, the sooner leaders make the investments, the smaller the shock will be after China’s TQR management regime is removed. Although there are no limits on Green Box investments, fiscal constraints will make it so leaders must carefully allocate its investment into non-distorting procuctivity-enhancing activities.

Recent increases in the government’s support to enhance agricultural productivity growth indicate that China already has begun to respond to the challenges posed to China under the WTO regime and believes that investment-enhancing investments will play an important role in making China’s farmers competitive. For example, total agricultural research expenditures in real terms grew annually at more than 10 percent. Growth of these expenditures has grown during the late 1990s . Moreover, China currently considers agricultural biotechnology as one of the primary measures to improve its national food security, raise agricultural productivity, and create its competitive position in international agricultural markets. Public agricultural research investment in plant biotechnology has increased at a rate even faster than the rest of the research sectors . However, despite the growth in spending on agricultural research, investment intensity was only 0.44 percent in 1999, one of the lowest levels in the world . Much more needs to be done. Complementary investments are also needed. For example, financing agricultural technology extension is even more problematic . During China’s reform period, the expansion of the output of agricultural production due to the increased incentives from decollectivization ranks as one of the nation’s great achievements, though a significant portion of that gain arose from the mobilization of inputs. China’s future agricultural production increases, however, may not be able to rely on inputs as much as in the past. Other correlates of development, such as rising wage rates, environmental awareness, resource limitations, and recent China’s WTO accession, mean that there will be pressure on farmers to reduce input use and their production costs. As the nation’s farmers near input plateaus, further growth in output must begin to rely more on technological change and systems must be in place to generate the technology and extend it to farmers. The nation needs to continue its recent trends of investment into rural infrastructure. Over the past several decades, tremendous improvements have been made in areas such as transportation, irrigation, and flood control. These projects should be continued in the future. Recent decisions to improve marketing infrastructure, including attempts to set up market and price reporting information and the standardization of agricultural product, are moving the emphasis of officials in the right direction. In other words, it is exactly these types of investments that the government is supposed to and is capable of making. These are all Green Box policies, meaning there is no limit to the support China can give its domestic agriculture through such productivity-enhancing investments. Such investments may have a number of indirect effects, also. A better environment for China’s producers mean that investors, both domestic and from abroad may be will to transfer in better technology. The government should also invest in the activities that will help promote the import of technology and investment. In some case, productivity-enhancing technology can be more easily obtained by importing new technologies and inputs. In the WTO environment, opportunities exist to reduce the barriers that have been keeping China’s farmers from having access to the lowest cost technology in the world. Restrictions on the imports of seed, pesticides and herbicides and barriers keeping out foreign direct investment in the agricultural input sector should be expected to be gradually removed.

Farmers exposed to flooding are different in a number of ways that might directly influence adoption

Any treatment effects on farmer-level uptake might occur simultaneously with supply responses by dealers.To measure this, we surveyed seed dealers around the same time as the farmer survey. We timed the survey to be in September so that seed purchases would be recently completed and easier to recall for dealers. Dealers were asked which varieties they carried for the 2017 season, how much of each was sold, and whether they were selling seeds from private companies or from the state’s seed corporation. Our sample consists of 613 dealers from the list of dealers obtained prior to the experiment.A large fraction could not be located or were no longer selling rice seeds. Specifically, 22.8 percent of them could not be reached. Of the 473 dealers located, 274 were selling rice seeds in the 2017 season. In results that follow, we show effects both for all dealers that were reached and those that remained in the seed business. Table A2 shows that the likelihood of being located and the probably of selling rice seeds during the 2017 season are uncorrelated with treatment. Focusing on the treatment blocks, about 42 percent of the dealers surveyed received the intervention. In addition to these dealer sales, we obtained data on the physical location of seed production. Seeds are grown by registered farmers that contract with the state to produce seeds that meet minimum certification standards. OSSC then collects, processes,hydroponic equipment and bags these seeds before selling them to farmers during the next season. The average block in our study had 32 seed growers per season from 2014 to 2019.

We use records from a publicly available database that gives the location of each seed grower, the contracted area, the variety they produced, and the amount that was collected and processed. Seed growers tend to be large farmers. They have incentives to produce the most profitable varieties for their land — just like farmers.As such, their production of a new variety depends on them being convinced of its potential. We therefore aggregate seed production at the block-season level and estimate the effect of the dealer treatment on the amount of Swarna-Sub1 produced in the block. Returning to farmer-level information, we use remote sensing data to approximate flooding risk. These data help us predict which farmers are expected to benefit the most from Swarna-Sub1. Being able to observe a key determinant of returns makes it possible to test for heterogeneous treatment effects according to a proxy for predicted benefits. More simply, is there a trade off between intervening with private-sector agents and a technology reaching the right people? Or, does involving input suppliers in the diffusion of information cause technology to diffuse to high-return individuals? We have GPS coordinates of the houses for 83 percent of the farmers that we surveyed in 2017.These coordinates are matched to daily images of flooded areas from June to October for the period 2011 to 2017. We consider a household as exposed to flooding on a given day if their house is within one kilometer of any flooded area.We then aggregate the total number of days of flood exposure across the 7 years as a measure of flooding risk — and hence as a proxy for the return to Swarna-Sub1. The online appendix shows three characteristics of this variable. First, it varies substantially across the sample . About 30 percent of households were not exposed to flooding. In contrast, 10 percent of households had flooding for 40 days or more. Second, this variation is partly driven by geographic characteristics. Particularly, Figure A4 shows that flooding is more frequent in lower-elevation areas that are closer to rivers.

These correlations provide verification that our measure at least partly reflects underlying determinants of flooding risk — not just recent flood shocks. Third, farmers exposed to more flooding tend to be smaller, poorer, and belong to low-caste social groups . Informing private input dealers and providing them with seeds to test leads to greater adoption by farmers when compared to conventional extension approaches used by the public sector. Table 2 shows this result. Starting with Column 1, farmers in treatment blocks are 3.5 percentage points more likely to have adopted Swarna-Sub1 a year after the treatment, compared to farmers in control blocks. Given an adoption rate of 6.3% in the control group, this implies the treatment leads to a 56% increase in uptake. The treatment also caused acreage cultivated to increase: farmers in treatment blocks planted an average of 0.06 more acres with Swarna-Sub1 compared to farmers in control blocks, a 69% increase . This adoption effect operates on both the extensive and intensive margins: private agrodealers also caused cultivated area of adopters to increase. Focusing specifically on the 329 adopters in treatment blocks, they cultivated 10% more of their land with Swarna-Sub1 compared to the 210 adopters in control blocks . Table A4 shows that decomposing the intensive and extensive margins more formally with a tobit model leads to the same conclusions. Our specifications in Table 2 use only the random variation created in the experiment. Table A5 verifies that controlling for the large set of covariates included in the balance test does not change the result. The point estimates stay similar when including these additional explanatory variables. Table A6 shows that the level of contact with extension agents or with cluster demonstrations is very low, even with our reinforced extension service in control blocks and that farmers in treatment blocks were no less likely to be in contact with extensions workers,or to have observed a demonstration of Swarna-Sub1, compared to control farmers.In other words, we do not find evidence of displacement at the expense of other traditional channels. Following up on the idea of displacement, we look at whether the treatment displaced other new varieties, potentially lowering welfare if it caused a shift away from high-quality seeds. We find no such evidence. Table A7 shows that the treatment had a negative effect on adoption of only two seed varieties — both of which were released over three decades ago. It does not appear that the increase in adoption caused by agrodealers corresponds to a shift away from newly released technologies. Finally, we find no evidence that the SMS messages increased adoption . They also did not change the effectiveness of the dealer treatment. The adoption gains from the dealer treatment cannot be obtained with a “lighter touch” SMS messaging intervention, at least in our context. The evidence on average adoption rates shows that helping private agrodealers learn is more effective than conventional approaches used in the public sector.

A concern may be that, as private agents, dealers optimize behavior based on their own expected sales and profits; in contrast with government extension agents who can factor in equity and may be better at targeting farmers who have high expected returns to adoption. It is however not obvious whether profit maximizing dealers will deliver inferior targeting. profit maximization strategies and farmers benefiting from adoption could coincide and may lead to similar outcomes, especially if we consider the repeated interactions between dealers and farmers over time. In our context, being exposed to frequent flooding gives an easy-to-observe measure of potential returns — given the flood tolerance property of the variety.We show that treatment dealers were successful at targeting Swarna-Sub1 to farmers who could benefit the most from the new technology, i.e. farmers who live in flood prone areas. Figure 2 separates the sample by the satellite-based measure of past flooding and shows that treatment effects only exist in approximately half the sample where there were at least 3 flood days from 2011 to 2017. Conversely, the dealer treatment had little or no effect on adoption in the bottom half of the sample. In Table 3, we show how the treatment effect is heterogeneous based on the number of flood days. Two results stand out in the table. First, control farmers who live in flood prone areas are less likely to adopt Swarna-Sub1. This negative relationship is true whether flood risk is measured in days of flooding or as a binary variable separating the sample into high- and low-risk farmers based on the median number of flood days . Indeed,vertical grow table being a high-risk control farmer is associated with a 6% lower likelihood of adoption compared to low-risk control farmers. But it is important to emphasize that this estimate is merely a correlation.Second, and more importantly, the dealer treatment was only effective in flood-prone areas, i.e. the interaction between treatment and flooding exposure is positive. The interaction term in Column 1 is less precise, likely because the heterogeneity in Figure 2 did not appear to be linear. But Column 2, which corresponds most closely with the figure, shows that the dealer treatment targets high-risk farmers increasing their adoption by 6.4%, while the effect of the treatment is only 0.8% for low-risk farmers . The difference between the two treatment effects is statistically significant at the 10% level. As another piece of evidence, Table A9 shows that the average adopter in treatment blocks is more exposed to flooding. Specifically, they are more than twice as likely to be above the median in terms of flood exposure.

There is no evidence that informing dealers prioritizes adoption by the wealthiest farmers, which might have been expected if agrodealers cater more to larger and wealthier farmers. In particular, Table A10 shows that there is no treatment-effect heterogeneity according to farm size. Adoption is more likely by larger farmers, but this is equally true in treatment and control blocks. We also find no heterogeneity according to being below the poverty line or in a marginalized caste group. Recall that we only treated a fraction of the dealers in each block. More precisely, 42% of sample dealers in treatment blocks received seeds and information . These dealers were not randomized. Hence, our dealer-level analysis compares all private dealers in treatment blocks to those in control blocks. We therefore capture any direct effect of receiving the seeds and information and any spillovers — which of course could be either negative or positive. There is some evidence that the treatment caused dealers to increase the availability of Swarna-Sub1. Columns 1-4 in Table 4 show results from one year after the treatment . Focusing on all dealers — including those that were no longer operating — the treatment has a small positive effect on the likelihood of carrying Swarna-Sub1 at any time during the season and the total amount the dealer reported selling throughout the year . But both of these estimates are very imprecise, partly due to some dealers no longer being in business. Amongst the subset of active dealers, those in treatment blocks were 6.2 percentage points more likely to carry Swarna-Sub1, a 17 % increase . Column 4 shows that dealers in treatment blocks sold 3.7 additional quintals, which represents a 59% increase in volume sold. But again, while larger, neither of these results are close to statistically significant. Anticipating on an intervention done in year 3 , we find large and precise effects on stocking behavior . 19.3% of dealers in control blocks had Swarna-Sub1 in stock when visited by the secret shopper.This increases by 11.4 percentage points in treatment blocks. This large effect is being observed two years after the treatment. It also comes from a direct observation of what the dealer had available on a certain day, rather than a noisy estimate from what they recalled after the season. This result could be driven by a number of things. First, it could come directly from the dealers that were treated and had their information sets updated. Second, dealers talk to farmers. Any increase in knowledge of farmers could spread to other dealers, not only those that were treated. Third, dealers were provided with several minikits for testing. They could have shared those in a way that increased local knowledge. We cannot distinguish between these effects in the analysis. We next test whether the treatment changed the extent of local seed production. Our data here amount to six observations per block: three from the period before our treatment could have triggered a production response and three from the post treatment period .

The Narrative Policy Framework or NPF forms the primary theory guiding the analysis

In comparison to forest, agricultural habitats are less stable and more regularly disturbed.These attributes could preclude sustained competition and favor related species with traits that allow them to persist in agriculture’s novel and variable conditions . Previous work with the same data set demonstrated that bird functional diversity is lower in intensive mono cultures than in forest reserves or diversified agricultural systems, suggesting that agriculture can act as an ecological filter . We further explored this idea by analyzing whether land use affects the distribution of several functional traits thought to regulate bird responses to environmental disturbances . Indeed, granivores and birds with wider diet breadths and larger clutch sizes had higher colonization rates in agriculture . Additionally, compared with smaller species, larger birds experienced higher extirpation rates in intensive mono cultures but lower extirpation rates in diversified agricultural systems . Our results suggest that both agricultural expansion and intensification threaten evolutionarily distinct species, aligning with earlier findings of heightened global endangerment among birds from basal lineages . In contrast, species from recently diversifying clades appear best able to exploit agricultural habitats and may thus benefit from ongoing agricultural expansion. The persistence of some species from younger lineages cannot prevent the species losses, and concomitant declines in phylogenetic diversity,roll bench that accompany agricultural intensification. Ultimately, protected areas are essential for preserving evolutionary history.

Yet in the absence of a much-expanded global reserve system, prioritizing diversified agricultural systems over intensive mono cultures, especially surrounding reserves, provides a strategy for enhancing the conservation value of human-modified landscapes. About the same number of species persisted in diversified agricultural systems as in forest reserves, and, as a result, diversified agricultural systems maintained 1.5 times the phylogenetic diversity of intensive mono cultures. Shepherding biodiversity through the human pressures of the 21st century will require a shared vision for conservation and agriculture, one that simultaneously preserves species and ecosystem functions while also enhancing food production and human well-being.The air quality in California’s San Joaquin Valley has been a cause of concern for many years. In 2003 there was an increasing sense of urgency to do something about it. One reason is that by many measures it is some of the worst air in the country. In 2003, the counties contained in the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District1 had the most unhealthy air days as measured by the federal eight-hour smog standard.The short-term one hour smog measure put the San Joaquin Valley in the second to worst category. The San Joaquin Valley is also “considered one of the worst places in the country for tiny particulate pollution” . In addition to the air quality, California’s longstanding exemption of agriculture from the Clean Air Act’s permitting requirements was under serious threat. On May 15, 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency settled a lawsuit with EarthJustice and other litigants that effectively ended the 63-year exemption. In order to ensure legislative action, the settlement stated, “If the state fails to revise its agricultural exemptions, increased pollution offset requirements will take effect on November 15, 2003, and California will lose its federal highway funding on May 15, 2004” .

California’s answer was SB 700, which was proposed by State Senator Dean Florez on February 21, 2003 and signed into law in September 22 of the same year. The legislation ended the state’s agricultural exemption to national air permits on January 1, 2004, and sought to reduce emissions from agricultural sources by creating a regulatory system of permits and stringent cleanup standards. These same agricultural sources would now have to apply for permits to cover both operations and the construction activities. SB 700 is an interesting combination of major policy change and status quo politics. On the one hand, it ended the agriculture industry’s exemption to air permits, imposed a permitting system for agricultural operations, and required stringent mitigation standards. On the other hand, agricultural stakeholders gained important concessions. Forty-nine amendments were attached to SB 700 that allowed agricultural interests ample consideration in shaping administrative rules and who/what would be covered under the permit system . They also received financial incentives for compliance and access to information on how to comply with the law. This examines the narratives surrounding SB 700 and their impact on its design. This leads to three main research questions: What are the important narratives making up the SB 700 policy discourse? What are the implications of these narratives for the design of SB 700? What are the implications of these narratives for policy theory and practitioners? In order to properly address the research questions, the paper is organized in the following manner. There is a brief description of the main elements of SB 700. This is followed by the data and methodology used for the analysis of SB 700 and a presentation of the theoretical framework for the paper.It also consists of a combination of Schneider and Ingram’s theory of policy design and Hajer’s discussion of story lines. After this comes a narrative analysis on the policy discourse surrounding SB 700. The analysis shows how various elements of policy design are linked to different policy narratives. The concluding section of the paper examines the important implications of the findings and discusses potential extensions of the research. On introducing his bill, Florez said its purpose was to end the agricultural exemption to national air permits and reduce emissions of air contaminants from agricultural sources.

While the design of SB 700 addresses these goals, the final version of the bill was not as stringent as originally written . The bill encountered strong opposition in the Assembly’s Appropriations Committee . Agricultural interests successfully argued that the regulations would be too tight and costly in terms of production and jobs , and SB 700 failed to pass the committee. The impasse necessitated negotiations between Senator Florez, Appropriations Committee members, environmental advocates, and agricultural industry representatives that produced important changes to the bill. The changes clarified the circumstances under which air districts would track pollution precursors such as ammonia, required consideration of costs for agriculture engine technology and the air districts when dealing with control measures, and extended the permit deadline for confined animal facilities, such as dairies, to allow completion of scientific studies . All told, the bill was amended 49 times before passing the Senate and Assembly . The amended version passed the Assembly 49 to 30 and the Senate by 24 to 14. The governor signed it on September 22, 2003. With the end of the exemption to national air permits, agricultural sources had to comply with both Title I and Title V of the Clean Air Act. The legislation provided the basic outline of this regulatory regime by defining what constitutes agricultural sources, as well as the level of allowable pollution. SB 700 established four main categories of agricultural sources: confined animal facilities ; internal combustion engines; major stationary sources; and sources otherwise not subject to district regulation. Agricultural sources emitting 50% of the major source threshold for a given pollutant would be required to obtain a permit from its local air district.2It now became the task of state and local air district officials to develop rules and detailed definitions of agricultural sources that would ensure compliance under the new regulatory framework. The California Air Resources Board was charged with defining what constitutes a “large” CAF for purposes of meeting the general permitting threshold. This required them to examine all available and relevant scientific information and “consider the emissions from CAFs and how those emissions affect attainment and maintenance of ambient air quality standards in air basins” . It is then the responsibility of the local air districts to adopt rules that require any CAFs meeting the state board’s definition of large to obtain permits from the district . This process does not establish a single rule governing mitigation measures for facilities falling under the “large” designation. Instead, it creates a case-by-case approach in which those applying for permits provide an inventory of emissions and a mitigation plan for reducing emissions to the extent feasible . This varies across air districts. For example, since the SJVAPCD is designated as “severe” non attainment for ozone,commercial greenhouse supplies the mitigation standard would be BACM. Air districts are to “make a good faith effort to minimize the adverse impacts of these rule making procedures” in terms of both feasibility and cost . Local air districts that were in “moderate” or “serious” non attainment of national ambient air quality standards for particulate matter as of January 1, 2004 were required to adopt regulations to reduce emissions from agricultural sources .The regulations were to address both “fugitive” and precursor emissions. Air districts were required to hold at least one public hearing to accept testimony on their proposed rule by September 1, 2004. The final rule was to be adopted on or before July 1, 2005 at a public hearing and be implemented by January 1, 2006. To aid those regulated under the new permit system, SB 700 created two additional instruments. The first is a mitigation clearinghouse. CAPCOA in consultation with CARB will create and maintain a database of mitigation measures or strategies available for agricultural sources. This allows for those seeking permits to view benchmarks and acceptable practices for reducing emissions. The second instrument is access to financial resources.

SB 700 would require the California Pollution Control Financing Authority to expand access to the Capital Access Loan Program for Small Businesses to include outreach to financial institutions that serve agricultural interests for the purpose of funding air pollution control measures . This would help to guarantee loans made for to purchase pollution control equipment. Schneider and Ingram argue that elements of policy design are political phenomena amenable to empirical analysis. In particular, “Data can be generated by the study of texts, such as legislative histories, statutes, guidelines, speeches, media coverage, and analysis of symbols contained therein” . The data used to analyze the policy design of SB 700 was gathered from several sources. The first is the legislative record for the bill. Since SB 700 was passed and signed into law by Governor Davis, material from the governor’s chaptered bill files are part of the database. In addition to the official record of the bill, newspaper articles and editorials concerning SB 700 were included for analysis. Searching the ProQuest newspaper database from February 21, 2003 to September 22, 2003 using the keyword “SB 700” yields 81 newspaper articles and editorials for use in the narrative analysis. Articles and editorials after this date are used to examine the dynamic relationship between narratives, policy tools, and agents and implementation structures in the implementation activities of SB 700. A special report entitled “Last Gasp” published in the Fresno Bee on December 15, 2002 is also included in the narrative analysis. While the report predates the introduction of SB 700, it is included because it is continually cited by the bill’s author and its supporters and opponents in the legislative materials. Its importance in shaping the debate over this bill warrants its inclusion. The specific form of discourse analysis used to analyze the texts of SB 700 will be Roe’s narrative policy analysis, which consists of two stages. The first is the disaggregation of the text into discrete problem statements, which contain the simplest assertions of causal relationships or sets of causal relationships that link problems to their source . The second stage requires the aggregation of all the problem statements across the entire “data set” or texts. This allows the researcher to see the pattern of commonly identified problems and causal relationships concerning the policy. It is these aggregated problem statements that are then identified as narratives . The NPF framework is used to identify and demonstrate the implications of narratives for the design of SB 700 . The framework identifies a basic structure of narratives and provides basic belief system linkages and preliminary hypotheses. The basic structures of a narrative include “a setting or context; a plot that introduces a temporal element . . . providing both the relationships between the setting and characters, and structuring causal mechanisms; characters who are fixers of the problem , causers of the problem , or victims ; and the moral of the story, where a policy solution is normally offered” . This structure is grounded in a belief system that anchors the narrative “in generalizable content to limit variability” .

The project was vast by any stretch of the imagination

Rosen wrote ten ‘comprehensive studies’ of American agriculture which totaled over 1,300 pages, which helped him earn his Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture in 1908. In that same year Rosen moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and became a U.S. citizen on December 30, 1909. Rosen was, by then, an expert on American farming techniques and technology, knowledge that would serve him well in his capacity as an agronomist. Indeed, after Rosen had closed the Minneapolis office in 1914 and moved to New Jersey, he became an agronomist and principal at the Baron de Hirsch Agricultural School located at Woodbine. Rosen later resigned his position at the Agricultural School and moved to New York where he became the U.S. representative for a St. Petersburg bank.In the early 1920s Rosen traveled back to his native Russia as a member of the United States’ American Relief Administration, headed by the future U.S. President Herbert Hoover. The team assisted the Russians during the massive country-wide famine of 1919-1922. In Russia Rosen served as head of the Jewish Joint Distribution Service. It was in this capacity that Rosen ‘got his feet wet’ as an administrator of the Jewish philanthropy.

Hoover had nothing but fine praise for Rosen writing that he was a fine personality and superb administrator.Rosen later teamed up with his future partner Rosenberg,round plastic pots to administer Jewish settlement schemes in the Ukraine and the neighboring Crimean Peninsula. Rosen’s partner, James Rosenberg, was the business side of DORSA. Trained as a corporate attorney practicing in New York, Rosenberg was the chairman of the Agro-Joint, a Jewish philanthropy that channeled funds to various projects. Rosenberg was the grandson of a German rabbi who had immigrated to Pittsburgh. The Rosenberg family had moved to New York when James was an impressionable youngster. His mother and father had enrolled James in the progressive Society for Ethical Culture, “founded in 1876 to promote the advancement of social justice.”Wells describes the mission of the Society as “one that was rooted in the intellectual mastery of nature, the glorification of life in art and with its consecration in morality.”This grounding in ethics was to serve the future attorney well, guiding him in the decision making processes that occupied his professional career. Rosenberg later entered a ‘Waspish’ private boarding school before his acceptance into Columbia Law School, then considered among the very best universities in the United States.After graduating from law school at Columbia University, New York, Rosenberg set about on the path to success as a corporate bankruptcy attorney, a profession which was soon to provide him with the funds and means to do charitable work. In truth, James Rosenberg was the quintessential American success story. A grandson of immigrants who arrived in America without the safety network of family and friends, he became widely successful in his chosen profession as a lawyer.

Rosenberg’s dogged determination served him well as he rose through the ranks of the corporate world as a young and brash attorney to become a member of what Wells termed a ‘sophisticated and elite group.’Joseph Rosen and James Rosenberg joined forces in the early 1920’s to assist the Russian Government in resettling of Jews in the Crimea and Ukraine as agriculturalists. This experience gave them a firm grounding in the nuts and bolts of starting and running agricultural settlements. The estimates of Jewish refugees who were resettled in the Crimean Peninsula and the Ukraine during the years 1924-1938 differ among the available sources. Kaplan uses the figure of 250,000, who ultimately cultivated three million acres, and also imported approximately 1,000 American made tractors.Wells gives slightly different figures, pegging the refugees at upwards of 150,000 Jews, and the land at nearly two million acres. The amount of money that the Joint earmarked for the project was the astronomical sum of seventeen million dollars.The valuable experience that Rosenberg and Rosen gained through the Russian settlement scheme was crucial, and provided a model for the Dominican settlement at Sosúa. The Crimea/Ukraine model that was developed by Rosen, and later put into effect at Sosúa, was based on a three-part plan: crop diversification, new ‘superior’ technology, and cooperative division of land, labor and resources. Rosen firmly believed that this plan could help transform the Jews from a parasitic bunch of rootless wanderers into productive members of society through the cultivation of land.Superior U.S. farm machinery, such as the tractor, translated into more acreage that could be put to use; and the cooperative nature of the settlements meant that all members could share the costs of fertilizers, seeds, and new equipment.

The division of labor was in the main determined by gender, men doing the heavy work such as the plowing and clearing of fields, the women cooking, planting, sewing and caring for the kids. There were doubts, however, that the Crimea program would succeed at all. Rosenberg summed up most succinctly his thoughts regarding the project: “The Crimean scheme had ended in ‘utter, complete, black tragedy.”Again, the political scientist Allan L. Kagedan argued that the Crimea plan was one that seemed to have little chance for success. Many people that were involved in the project believed in the “clear likelihood that the scheme would fail.” The majority of Jews were not, in the main, people of the land but urbanites mostly involved in some form of commerce. Indeed, Kagedan, writing in the academic journal Jewish Social Studies, quotes Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe who reminded the JDC in March 1928 “that agriculture is an economic branch which is foreign to the Jews who are neither physically nor spiritually adapted to it.” Kagedan was aware that “not all Jews would transform themselves into farmers, many would abandon the land in short order.”The employment profile of the refugees was heavily weighted towards the professional ranks with very few of them having had any background or experience in agriculture. Yet the ultimate success of the Crimean and Ukrainian settlements gave both men high hopes of a repeat performance at distant Sosúa. The Rosenberg/Rosen partnership endured throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s culminating in the founding of Sosúa in the Dominican Republic. Rosenberg drew up the documents of incorporation for DORSA in New York during December of 1939, with himself as President and Rosen as Vice President. Trujillo was anxious to get the project up and running as soon as feasibly possible. The dictator was in international hot water for the mass murder of Haitians in October of 1937. The Parsley Massacre, in Spanish El Corte, was a stain on Dominican history and needed to be reconciled before the tiny Caribbean nation would again be respected on the world’s stage. Trujillo needed to remain in the good graces of the United States, its giant neighbor to the north, chief trading partner and principal benefactor. The dictates of the Good Neighbor policy of the United States provided that the U.S. not interfere in the affairs of its neighbors and satellite states. This foreign policy was central to F.D.R.’s presidency and “meant that the United States emphasized cooperation and trade rather than military force to maintain stability in the hemisphere.”

The Good Neighbor Policy also gave Trujillo free reign to rule as he pleased, without the fear of further economic sanctions or military intervention from the United States. The Dominican Republic had been subject to crippling economic sanctions since the U.S. took control of the Dominican Republic’s customs house. This was done to secure payment for its debt to bondholders. The receivership was a sore spot that severely strained relations between the two countries, and was something that El Generalíssimo wanted to resolve immediately in favor of his economically strapped nation. Indeed, in 1905 the United States announced that it would “guarantee the territorial integrity of the Dominican Republic [and] assume responsibility for customs house collections…using 55% of receipts to pay outstanding obligations, turning over the remainder for Dominican governmental expenditures”.This policy was eventually overturned on March 31 1941,hydroponic bucket and with its abolition the Dominican Republic now, after a long, humiliating thirty six years, finally controlled its domestic finances. Yet another point of contention involved the importation of Dominican sugar into the United States and its territories. Trujillo desperately wanted the U.S. to increase its import quota of sugar produced in the Dominican Republic, the U.S. instead favoring Cuba and Puerto Rico over the Dominican Republic. The dictator lobbied James Rosenberg for help in providing representation in Washington D.C.. Rosenberg could only promise Trujillo to do what he could to advance the Dominican cause in the U.S. press, thereby avoiding any possible conflict of interest that could derail efforts to reverse the crippling stranglehold that the sugar quota imposed on the Caribbean island nation’s economy. The plan was to create a favorable public relations spin via press releases and the like, which would cast Trujillo in a positive light. Rosenberg goes into some detail in his Diary I regarding exactly what Trujillo wanted from the United States: the abolishment of the Receivership Convention, and an increase of the U.S. sugar import quota. This would then allow the Dominican Republic to increase its sugar exports to its chief foreign market and infuse much needed hard currency into the nation’s coffers.

Trujillo knew the value of having an attorney as well connected as Rosenberg firmly in his corner. Rosenberg notes that an American named Mr. Rickards who had been “working down here first for the Government and then the sugar institute of which he is now head, his title being “Secretary-General,” paid him a visit on behalf of El Generalíssimo.”Mr.Rickards came around with heaps of papers, documents, records, etc. that Trujillo had sent him with…regarding the Convention, regarding sugar, regarding economic or legal problems confronting the country; that the General wanted me to have the facts.” On one of Rosen’s and Rosenberg’s visits to the Generalíssimo, the shrewd New York attorney relates that “Trujillo handed me the memorandum and said he would like to talk to me about it later.”The memorandum presented to Rosenberg spelled out the issues that Trujillo wanted resolved. Rosenberg promised the dictator that he would do everything in his power to effect a positive outcome through the use of politically connected people, mainly lobbyists, who Rosenberg knew well. Rosenberg was adamant that Trujillo needed elite representation in Washington, and told Trujillo that he would make recommendations as to who the Generalíssimo should use to represent the Dominican Republic. The U.S. Receivership of Dominican Customs had long been a source of embarrassment to Trujillo, the nation, and its people. Rosenberg noted in his diary that “…this interference with [Dominican] sovereignty was a constant irritation,” and continued “There are two main problems—sugar—Convention…It would seem to me important that the Dominican Government ought to make itself heard,” and following this line of reasoning Rosenberg continued “because of the many legal, economic and problems as to the Convention, you need able counsel in Washington. You should also see to it that the American public understands something of these problems which confront you.” In spite of Trujillo’s insistence that Rosenberg represent the Dominican Republic’s interests in Washington D.C., Rosenberg bowed out by telling Trujillo that “it was utterly out of the question for me to be the lawyer.” Trujillo pressed Rosenberg to select the lawyer with Rosenberg again turning down the dictator’s request. Rosenberg would, however, recommend a lawyer should Trujillo send the ‘right man’ up to the States.Yet another reason that explains Trujillo’s magnanimous offer at Évian was his desire to ‘whiten’, in Spanish blanquear, the Dominican populace through miscegenation. Trujillo believed that bringing Jews to his country would prompt inter-breeding between Jews and Dominicans, thereby creating a new, whiter breed of Dominican. This was an obsession of Trujillo and the Dominican people at large. The events of El Corte had generated world-wide, negative press, and prompted Trujillo to scramble to repair his damaged image through, among other means, diplomatic maneuvering and slick public relations campaigns. It is estimated that as many as 20,000 Haitians had lost their lives to roving bands of thuggish Dominicans, including some military officers and soldiers.It is ironic that sugar was at the root of the massacre, as it was also the cause of Dominican embarrassment on the world’s stage.

Focusing on agricultural biotechnology scientists brings with it a number of advantages

For these commodities, the Domestic and Full changes from reference are therefore most similar. Indeed for Corn in particular, the inclusion of even spatially heterogenous, direction varying impacts across the entire world versus only in the U.S. makes very little difference in the physical output variables of GCAM considered: area, production, and endogenous yield. It is primarily in price that a difference between Domestic and Full is detectable for a given climate-crop impact combination. For commodities such as Wheat and Rice, shown in Fig 3, for which production is more spatially distributed globally, a shock to U.S. production is a smaller change in the scope of the full global system. Therefore for commodities such as these, the inclusion of impacts globally can lead to a reversal in the direction of changes relative to the Domestic case, particularly for production and/or revenue. For Wheat, reversals in the direction of revenue change occur in three of ten spatially heterogenous agricultural impacts scenarios driven by structurally different crop models, across a range of GCM drivers; for Rice, in five of ten. This suggests that the reversal in the direction of change when impacts are applied globally is emergent from the international dynamics themselves and not an artifact of the scenarios considered. These findings are again consistent with other models in the literature,indoor vertical farming and adds an additional regionally resolved, global-scale multi-sector economic model’s results to confirm the importance of examining global systems holistically, as conclusions may fundamentally change for several commodities when only domestic impacts are considered.

Figs 2 and 3 highlight that different changes from reference in the area allocated to individual commodities occur when impacts are applied in the Domestic versus Full scenario. For a more aggregated investigation of area allocation, Table 1 summarizes the change in landcover for total cropland, as well as changes from reference in the GCAM ‘other arable land’ type, forest, and grassland cover. Recall that impacts were not applied to forest or grassland in any of the scenarios under consideration, and so these area changes are strictly emergent from the changes in cropland as areas move into or out of agricultural crop production. The changes in forest and grassland are generally small, as GCAM features an explicit other arable land type in the crop competition logit nest . In the system modeled byGCAM, this land type is often the first and most impacted by cropland area changes. An exception is the HadGEM2-EPIC scenario: cropland areas decrease to such an extent that both other arable land and forest expand. The changes in total cropland area in the EPIC scenarios reported in Table 1 are generally smaller in magnitude than those reported. While GCAM’s simulations run through 2100, results are presented in 2050 for ready comparison with other results in the literature. S4 and S5 Figs present the 2100 data for the same variables as Figs 2 and 3 and S3 Fig; the relationships between the Domestic and Full scenarios that occur for each climate-crop combination observed above for 2050 data persist in 2100. The persistence of the relationships between Domestic and Full scenarios across time and across spatially heterogenous, varied climate-crop combinations again highlights the importance of accounting for international dynamics in examining agricultural quantities.

Over the last few decades, public and private interests have advocated for government policies to globally promote the commercialization of university science thereby altering the way publicly-funded research universities function. This has been particularly true in the U.S. and in its publicly-funded university system which began during the latter half of the 19th century. To understand the extent of this change, one needs to understand the formation and social basis for the U.S. public research university system. Federal legislation passed between 1862 and 1914, established public universities in every U.S. state to serve the citizens of each state with applied research and community-based education which provided free access to the research knowledge. Following World War II, these research universities were further augmented by policies which established a social contract between science and society whereby peer governed scientific research would provide benefits to society in exchange for substantial public support of university research. A key to implementing this social contract was the 1950 formation of the National Science Foundation which designated the universities as the primary basic research infrastructure for the nation . This social contract, which assumed that both public goods and private goods are needed to enhance the general public good, created a division of labor between the private and public research sectors . Universities received public funding to do basic and other research without direct applications for commercial products. The private sector, on the other land, conducted more applied and proprietary research . The values of these two communities vary significantly . The primary goal of industry research is to generate trade secrets, patents and exclusive licensing for commercial gain. Research agendas are set through a hierarchical structure with an emphasis on secrecy, intellectual property and proprietary products. In contrast, university research primarily conducted within a more individualistic organizational structure is generally expected to advance knowledge and address broad social problems. Research priority setting and review processes are more transparent, and knowledge is made available to the public through professional journals and university and government publications .

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, U.S. policy makers began to specify how these benefits would occur by establishing special mechanisms for university-industry relationships . Key legislation including the 1980 Senate Bayh-Dole Act, the 1980 Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act, the 1986 Federal Technology Transfer Act, and a series of executive orders and judicial decisions, placed a new emphasis on harnessing university research to foster the emergence of the knowledge economy and promote university-industry collaborations . The Bayh-Dole Act, in particular, created a uniform patent policy among the many federal agencies that fund research, enabling nonprofit organizations, including a provision enabling universities to retain title to inventions made under federal funded research programs. Universities were encouraged to collaborate with commercial organizations, particularly small businesses, to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federal funding. In 2002, an opinion piece in The Economist observed that the Bayh-Dole Act is perhaps the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century. At the 30th anniversary of Bayh-Dole Act, the Association of University Technology Managers noted that this legislation changed fundamentally the way America develops technologies from federally funded university research and effectively secured the country’s leadership position in innovation . Since the passage of the Bayh-Dole legislation, many countries worldwide have adopted similar policies including Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Although partnerships between universities and industries had existed for several decades, the new emerging types of university-industry relationships, stimulated in part by these policy changes and particularly in biotechnology and agricultural biotechnology, were generally more varied, wider in scope, more aggressive and experimental, and higher in public visibility than the relationships of the past . The rationale behind these policy reforms and partnerships was that the knowledge economy provided new opportunities for the private sector to utilize research universities’ technologies to foster economic growth . The assumption was that the UIRs would foster the flow of knowledge and technology from the university to the private sector, while also generating increased basic research funding without changing the activities of working scientists,best indoor vertical garden system the university at a structural level, or the process and outcomes of research and educational activities. However, a number of research analysts and skeptics have countered that commercialization of university science threatens the distinct cultures and their important complementary functions . They claim that the university is losing its distinctive incentive system, which is structured to promote a focus on publicly accessible outputs for which the private sector cannot capture sufficient rewards. Some claim that commercialization of university science is blurring distinctions between the two research cultures. Moreover, these analysts maintain that the research cultures are converging and that convergence favors the private sector. Some research institutions and private industry are engaged in basic research and an increasing number of universities are involved in the production of intellectual property and the creation of start-up companies. In 2011, U.S. universities and their inventors earned more than US$ 1.8 billion from commercializing their academic research, and collecting royalties from a variety of sources such as new breeds of wheat and strawberries, a new drug for treatment of HIV, and longstanding arrangements over products like Gatorade. These universities also completed over 5 000 licenses, filed for over 12 000 new patents and created 617 start-up companies .

Nevertheless, changes in universities are matters of degree. In recent years universities conducted 53% of the basic research in the U.S. while industry accounted for just 14%. Moreover, although university patenting actually has increased dramatically, universities still account for less than 5% of patents granted in the U.S. . However, several reasons for concern regarding an erosion of public interest research at universities still exist. Studies have found a rise in data withholding, secrecy, and impaired communication among university scientists . Studies have also explored how academic-industry interactions lead university and industry collaborators to take on characteristics of their counterparts and foster institutional conflicts of interest ; how university research topics over time come to parallel private sector research topics ; and how scientific fraud is associated with commercial ties . Industry funding has also been correlated with outcomes favorable to the funder, perhaps due to researcher bias, whether conscious or unconscious, associated with conflicts of interests . One major explanation for the effects of commercialization on university science is the shift in institutional cultures that shape scientists’ preferences and actions. This focus on institutional cultures and structures, however, tends to mask the internal diversity of university researchers and the co-existence of complex, even contradictory, institutional rationales and scientist perspectives and values. Therefore, it is equally important to focus on the micro-level to better understand scientists as strategic actors in the midst of shifting boundaries between the two cultures. This perspective acknowledges that scientists are self-interested, purposively rational actors motivated to act by personal preferences or tastes within particular institutional contexts. Furthermore, this perspective recognizes the potential for variation among scientists, administrators and managers within and between institutional cultures . In this paper, we examine the persistence or convergence of the two cultures of science through exploration of the perceptions and values of university and industry scientists, managers and administrators who participate in or oversee university-industry research collaborations in the area of agricultural biotechnology.Traditionally, agriculture has been the recipient of substantial public investment to support and attract private sector investment . Further, university research plays a more integral role in the field of biotechnology than for many other areas such as mechanical engineering, computer science or chemistry. More than two decades ago, writers were referring to universities as the lifeblood of biotechnology . In addition, agricultural biotechnology was an early target of efforts to commercialize university research because so much of the research for the emerging agricultural biotechnology sector was conducted in the large public U.S. universities and their colleges of agriculture and life sciences . Statements from university leaders and industry 20 yr ago indicated that agricultural biotechnology would revolutionize farming in the future with tremendous impact on the crops and animals grown for food and affecting agriculture in ways never before dreamed possible.The first commercial biotech crops were introduced in 1996. The acreage/hectarage for these crops have increased every year from 1996 to 2012 in both developing and industrial countries, increasing from 1.7 million ha in 1996 to over 170 million ha in 2012. While the U.S. continues to be the lead country with 69.5 million ha followed by Brazil , Argentina , Canada , and India , for the first time, in 2012, developing countries planted more hectares of the principal biotech crops than industrial countries. The number of countries growing these crops also continues to increase, reaching 20 developing countries and 8 industrial countries. Further, stacked rather than single traits are becoming more important, with 13 countries planting biotech crops with two or more traits in 2012. At the same time last year a record number of farmers grew Bt crops with over 90% being small resource-poor farmers in developing or emerging countries. In China a record 7.2 million small farms elected to plant biotech cotton.

Pena shows that border enforcement is negatively associated with agricultural worker migration specifically

These efforts to manage groundwater supply and groundwater quality make the agricultural community subject to an evolving set of new requirements for documentation of key farm activities, training, practice improvement, monitoring and reporting. This will be a significant and in some cases expensive shift in farming practices. It is without parallel in California’s agricultural history. As was the case with the development and implementation of water quality regulatory programs in the 1970s through 1990s that targeted and significantly changed practices in industrial and urban land uses, the transition period will be challenging for this newly regulated community and likely take a generation to be fully effective. To the degree that a more centralized, region-wide effort — rather than a farm-by-farm approach — can direct the goals of these new programs, the ILRP coalitions will have a key role in providing services to help member farmers comply, at an annual cost currently ranging from about $3 to $7 per acre finding. Similar coordination and funding approaches may evolve within the GSAs that implement the new sustainable groundwater management legislation, with some additional funding available also through state and federal grants. But in addition to paying monitoring and compliance fees, farmers and their employees will also participate in training and continuing education, provided through the ILRP coalitions, local GSAs, UC ANR Cooperative Extension, National Resources Conservation Service, Resource Conservation Districts and others; and on many farms, significant infrastructure improvements are needed to address groundwater quality and quantity concerns, at significant cost to the farm operation finding. This is not a transition period only for farmers; it is also a transition period for scientists and educators who develop and provide innovative management practices and training to protect groundwater quality and better understand the groundwater–agriculture interface.

Agronomic and crop scientists have rarely taken into account losses of contaminants to groundwater when developing best management practices and farm recommendations. Existing recommendations for fertilizer applications, for example,vertical growing towers are in urgent need of revision to account for potential unwanted losses of nutrients to groundwater finding. Another challenge for scientists is the design of groundwater monitoring networks. Existing groundwater research has developed many approaches to monitoring distinct contaminant plumes, typically a few acres in size finding, but recommendations for the design of non-point source monitoring networks are currently lacking finding. Furthermore, this is a transition period for regulatory agencies, which for the first time are regulating non-point sources of groundwater pollution that involve large tracts of land with numerous individual landowners who are adjacent to each other and a wide range of crops, soils and management practices. For agencies, this is a situation that requires innovative strategies and a significant rethinking of existing programs that have been focused on point sources or surface water quality. For example, regulatory agencies have long focused on shallow groundwater monitoring wells as a key tool for monitoring potential waste discharges into groundwater and to detect inadvertent contaminant plumes from point sources, such as from underground gasoline storage tanks. Underground storage tanks are discrete point sources, and leaks from them can be detected by using down-gradient monitoring wells finding. Agricultural irrigation, in contrast, leaks by design across broad landscapes, to flush salts from the root zone. Agricultural irrigation has therefore also been a significant source of groundwater recharge, especially irrigation from older non-efficient systems.The specific monitoring requirements under each of the three tracks are a function of groundwater conditions, potential pollution sources, proximity to public and private water supply wells and existing contamination.

The role of the groundwater assessments described above is to better understand these aquifer conditions as a basis for developing these three-tracked monitoring programs effectively, efficiently and commensurate with groundwater vulnerability.Managing groundwater quantity in California’s diverse agricultural landscape is intricately linked to protecting groundwater quality and vice versa. New practices in the agricultural landscape to recharge clean water into aquifers while maintaining high irrigation efficiencies and while also controlling nutrient and pesticide leaching will address both groundwater overdraft and groundwater quality. Dzurella et al. finding and others have outlined numerous ways to improve nutrient management in California’s diverse cropping systems, following largely the concept of the Four Rs: Right amount, Right time, Right place, Right form finding. Significant educational efforts by universities, state and federal agencies, and industry groups will need to continue and intensify to support agriculture in moving forward with practices that better protect groundwater. There is one key complication around managing nutrients: while high nutrient-use efficiency reduces nitrate and pesticide loading, it also is typically achieved only with high water-use efficiency. In situations where irrigation water is imported to the groundwater basin rather than pumped from local aquifers, higher water-use efficiency translates into significant reductions in groundwater recharge, impacting long-term water supplies and raising the need for additional recharge of clean water. New agricultural practices, yet to be developed, also promise to play an important role in simultaneously addressing groundwater quality and groundwater quantity issues: the agricultural landscape potentially provides a wide range of opportunities for using floodwaters and other surplus surface water to recharge groundwater, whether with recharge basins, field flooding, targeted clean recharge irrigations or other methods finding. The significant potential for innovation and field testing in this arena could lead to water being intentionally recharged in the agricultural landscape without degrading water quality, possibly even improving water quality.

For example, in areas recharging groundwater for public supply wells finding, some nitrogen-intensive crops may be replaced with crops that are known to be relatively protective of groundwater quality. This has been shown to be an economically promising option to address long-term drinking water quality issues, especially in the source area of drinking water supplies for small, often disadvantaged communities finding. More research and pilot testing are needed.Groundwater management cannot be done without managing surface water resources. The future of groundwater use, protection and management in California’s agricultural landscape will be an increasingly integrated approach to managing the quality and quantity of both surface water and groundwater. Land-use planners must also be more involved in and informed by water planning and assessment activities. New regulations for groundwater sustainability and groundwater quality protection have emphasized the engagement of landowners and local stakeholders in the planning and implementation of new regulations, providing stakeholders, including farmers, with opportunities for engagement, dialogue and education. Integration of the new groundwater regulations with existing programs in integrated regional water management finding planning and urban water management planning will be needed. This integrated strategy will employ a diverse portfolio of approaches reflecting local needs, local technical and economic capacity, and the diversity of local stakeholders and of their engagement in these efforts.The share of hired agricultural workers who migrate within the United States plummeted by almost 60% since the late 1990s. This paper is the first to document and systematically analyze this drop in the migration rate. We estimate annual models of crop workers’ migration decisions for 1989 through 2009. Based on these estimates, we decompose the change in the migration rate into two causes: shifts in the demographic composition of the workforce and changes in coefficients .

During the same period as the migration rate decreased, the total number of farm workers fell.The combination of these two effects has substantially reduced the ability of farmers to adjust to seasonal shifts in labor demand throughout the year, leading to crises in which farmers report not being able to hire workers at the prevailing wage during seasonal peaks.As the academic literature shows, labor migration can temper the effects of macroeconomic shocks that vary geographically and the effects of industry restructuring such as those arising from the decline of manufacturing . The demographic composition of the agricultural work force has changed substantially since 1998. For example, the average worker today is older, more likely to be female, and more likely to be living with a spouse and children in the United States. We hypothesized that such workers might be less likely to migrate. We test various hypotheses and find that demographic changes played an important role in reducing the migration rate alongside underlying structural changes.The first section discusses U.S. and Mexican institutional, governmental, and economic changes during our sample period that affected the demographic composition of the agricultural workforce and the migration of workers. The next section describes our data set, provides summary statistics, and plots trends in migration rates over time. The third section presents the estimates of the migration choice model for various years. The fourth section decomposes the drop in the migration rate into changes due to shifts in the means of demographic variables, holding the model’s structure constant,container vertical farming and changes in the estimated coefficients, holding the means of the demographics constant. The fifth section shows how changes in the mean of individual demographic characteristics contributed to the decline in the migration rate. The last section summarizes our results.A number of institutional, governmental, and economic changes contributed to the reduction in the migration rate within the United States directly or through their effects on the demographic composition of the workforce. These shocks affected the supply and demand for labor in both Mexico and the United States.

At about the time that the migration rate started to fall in the late 1990s, many institutional changes occurred in the United States and Mexico that affected the ease of crossing the U.S.-Mexican border and the desire of Mexican nationals to cross. Several new U.S. laws and additional funding for border enforcement made crossing more difficult: the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the USA Patriot Act of 2002, the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the REAL ID Act of 2005, and the Secure Fence Act of 2006. According to a survey of migrants, the cost of crossing the border with the help of smugglers, or “coyotes,” rose substantially since mid-1990s.Cornelius notes that increasing coyote costs are associated with decreases in the probability of returning to a country of origin and with increases in deaths along the border.Newspaper articles indicate that the U.S. government substantially increased U.S.-Mexican border enforcement since the mid-2000s. In addition, changes in U.S.-Mexican foreign relations and in Mexican public policy reduced incentives for its citizens to move to the United States in the second half of our sample period . Mexican farm laborers were less like to migrate to the United States because of increased economic growth in Mexico, rising productivity, and decreased birth rates . The 1997 anti-poverty Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentaciónin Mexico increased welfare in Mexico through education, health, and conditional cash transfer initiatives, which decreased the incentive for workers to cross the border . Oportunidades also increased agricultural production in Mexico . Changes in the legal status of farm workers also affected the U.S. farm labor force. For example, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act conferred legal status on many previously unauthorized workers, which provided a path to a legal permanent residence status and citizenship. By so doing, IRCA reduced the share of unauthorized workers during the 1990s. Over time, many of these workers left agriculture. Together, these factors reduced the number of undocumented workers from Mexico in the United States. Martin reviews the history of immigration legislation and domestic enforcement and concludes that the e-verify program had little impact during the period immediately after IRCA went into effect. In contrast, Kostandini, Mykerezi and Escalante show that after 2002, counties participating in the Department of Homeland Security’s 287 enforcement program had fewer foreign-born workers, reduced labor usage, and experienced changes in cropping patterns among producers. In our empirical analysis, we investigate whether the willingness of a worker to migrate within the United States depends crucially on legal status. A variety of other structural factors also affected the supply and demand for U.S. farm labor. In recent years, increased consumer demand for fresh fruits and vegetables and expanded exports of agricultural commodities led to greater production of labor-intensive crops .

Switch grass also had poor stand establishment when compared to other grasses

Countries may provide more subsidies if the political accommodations that they buy are especially valuable. Indeed, Table 1 suggests that subsidies are more likely to occur in countries with a major reserve or in authoritarian countries, such as Iran or Venezuela.This research aims to explain the impact of the introduction of bio-fuels on fuel markets while introducing OPEC into the analysis. This work evaluates the impact of bio-fuels on fuel markets while incorporating OPEC into the analysis and assessing the effect of the introduction of bio-fuels on the international price of oil, the price of gasoline inside as well as outside of OPEC countries, and the global GHG emissions. This is done while making three alternative assumptions on the international oil markets: Markets are competitive, OPEC is a cartel of firms that maximizes profit, and OPEC is a cartel of nations that maximizes economic surplus from oil production and domestic consumption. Using data from 2007 while considering quantities of both ethanol and bio-diesel consumed that year finding, we developed a model that is used to synchronize outcomes among gasoline, diesel, and crude-oil markets—a challenge given that we only have partial data for each of the markets. A key parameter that affects the outcome of the analysis is how responsive the demand of oil from OPEC in the oil-importing countries is to changes in fuel prices. Less responsive finding demand means that, when price increases, there is less reduction in consumption or, inversely,livestock fodder system that prices go up further for a given decline in fuel demanded.

We use four parameters from -1.25 finding to -2.0 finding. The introduction of bio-fuels is estimated to have increased fuel subsidies in OPEC countries in 2007 by 2%–3% and reduced world fuel prices by 2%. The introduction of bio-fuels caused the import demand of oil from OPEC countries to decline, leading to a decline in fuel prices. Then, OPEC responded by reducing exports so that the supply of oil available to oil importers would decline, which would contribute to increased fuel prices in the oil-importing countries. Some of the oil that was withdrawn from the oil-importing countries went directly to OPEC’s domestic consumers. Thus, OPEC mitigated the loss in profits due to the introduction of bio-fuels by redistributing benefits from the introduction of bio-fuels to its domestic constituencies. The introduction of bio-fuels caused consumption of gasoline and diesel in 2007 to decline by about three billion gallons a year, which is about 2.5% of total consumption. However, the decline in fuel prices resulted in an increase in total fuel consumed finding. This increase in overall fuel consumption because of a lower price is called the “rebound effect.” For the range of elasticities investigated, we show a rebound effect of about nine billion gallons a year. The rebound effect may lead to an increase in overall GHG emissions with bio-fuels. While bio-fuels may emit less GHGs per unit of energy, the larger volume of fuel consumption may lead to a larger volume of GHG emissions. Using the cartel of nations model, we show that there is potential for GHG emission savings with the introduction of advanced bio-fuels, such as cellulosic bio-fuels. The model used to characterize the energy market affects estimates of the bio-fuel effects on consumption and production as well as on fuel prices and GHG emissions. Competition overestimates the price effect but underestimates both quantity and environmental effects associated with the introduction of bio-fuels finding.

Our analysis also shows that modeling the oil market as either competitive or with a cartel of nations overestimates the monetary benefits of the introduction of bio-fuels to oil importing countries but underestimates the costs to oil-exporting countries. The analysis suggests that the introduction of alternatives to crude oil finding will reduce fuel prices and crude-oil production but increase overall fuel consumption. The GHG emissions will decline if the alternatives to conventional fossil fuels are relatively clean but, for most commercially used bio-fuels, total GHG emissions will increase. The introduction of bio-fuels affects OPEC pricing behavior: OPEC mitigates the reduction in oil revenues due to the introduction of bio-fuels by increasing domestic fuel consumption but reducing exports more than implied by the introduction of bio-fuels under the competitive model. Thus, when assessing the impact of bio-fuels, the outcomes under a cartel of nations model are different than those under competition. Although the introduction of bio-fuels leads to a reduction of fuel prices in oil-importing countries, this reduction is smaller than the reduction computed under competition, suggesting that the estimated gain from bio-fuels to the consumers in the oil-importing countries under a cartel of nations is smaller than under competition finding. However, when compared to the competitive model, the cartel of nations predicts a larger reduction in exports and, thus, a larger reduction in foreign exchange. That is, the impact of bio-fuels on GHGs under the cartel of nations is relatively more positive than predicted by the competitive behavior. Theory and empirical analyses suggest that assessment of the impact of alternatives to crude oil require better quantitative modeling of the oil markets, including OPEC. They suggest that further empirical work, especially econometric analysis of OPEC pricing behavior, is needed to further support and expand this line of research and to improve our understanding of the international oil markets.

Data were collected in the biomass plant species study at Fruita for one harvest in 2010, three cuttings in 2011, and two cuttings in 2012. A third cutting will occur at Fruita during fall 2012. At Rifle, an initial harvest occurred in 2011 and one cutting has occurred in 2012. A second cutting will occur at Rifle during fall 2012. At Fruita, the Introduced Biomass Treatment has consistently had the highest biomass yield finding. While the Introduced Biomass Treatment included grass species, those grass species have disappeared from the plant stand and nearly all the biomass yield in this treatment is from alfalfa. Deficit irrigation is being used in this study and plant species such as alfalfa with a deep root system can explore a large volume of soil. This gives alfalfa an advantage over shallow-rooted grass species. The native grass entry in this study has exhibited low biomass yields compared to other biomass entries. Native grass species adapted to arid environments may persist well under harsh environments, but may not be high yielding. In previous research, switch grass has been found to be high yielding under high input conditions in some western Colorado environments, but not others finding. Establishment of some grass species, such as switch grass, may require a few years before they begin to produce high yields. During this establishment phase of switch grass, weeds have been a problem, particularly the winter annual weeds finding. Much of the biomass produced at Rifle in 2012 in switch grass was weeds, mainly cheat grass finding finding.No significant yield differences among the input treatments have occurred to date at Fruita or Rifle finding. There is a trend for higher yields in the high input treatment but again a few to several years may be needed before differences among input treatments become statistically significant. The high cost of producing bio-fuel feed stocks has been a major hurdle for growers, bio-refineries, and distributors. Identification of parameters could lower biomass production costs to promote the economic viability of locally produced biomass. Data from our research were used to develop a crop enterprise budget tool. The enterprise budgeting tool is user friendly for a variety of audiences, including producers, crop consultants, extension agents, and others. Parameters can be adjusted to reflect variations in location, crop management, best/worst case scenarios, or optimizing a specific input. For the purposes of this paper, the parameters of the crop enterprise budget have been adjusted to reflect specific agronomic scenarios. Large regions of the western United States are dominated by cool-season grasses with special adaptations to cold temperatures, sporadic and low precipitation, summer drought, salinity, high elevations with high ultraviolet radiation, and other unique and challenging growing conditions. Basin wild rye finding is a large native perennial grasses in western North America; however, its elevated growing point is easily damaged by grazing or mechanic harvesting.

Creeping wild rye finding is relatively short statured finding but is a strongly rhizomatous grass that recovers well following grazing, cutting, or other disturbances. Creeping x basin wild rye hybrids display a combination of plant height and rhizomatous traits that are useful in a low-input herbaceous biomass crop finding. The biomass yields of creeping x basin wild rye species were compared to other grasses over four years, with no irrigation or fertilizer,fodder system trays at two research farms in Utah and Idaho. Tall wheat grass finding and intermediate wheat grasses finding were top entries in the first two years. The single best entry in the third and fourth harvest years was a creeping x basin wild rye hybrid. In the first cutting that occurred in 2012 in the Native Grass Species Study being conducted at Fruita tall wheat grass had the highest yield. Intermediate wheat grasses also had high yields and also had low biomass plant moistures finding. The creeping wild rye x basin wild rye crosses exhibited intermediate yields while Altai wild rye and switch grass had the lowest yields with most of this biomass in the switch grass entry coming from weeds.With additional years, yield rakings of these native grass entries are likely to change from those of this initial cutting.A Rifle Bio-Feedstock Feasibility Study was conducted in 2008 for the City of Rifle, CO and in the statement of findings, the consultants noted that dedicated energy crops have potential in the area finding. A potential of 200-300,000 acres of marginal within a 50-mile radius of Rifle appears possible for production of dedicated, lignocellulosic biomass finding, although further refinement of the definition of marginal lands that could be used for bio-energy crops needs to be addressed. The construction of pilot plant is nearing completion at the Colorado Mountain College, Rifle campus and at this facility the various perennial biomass grass species will be converted into butanol. As demonstrated in the crop enterprise budget scenarios presented in Table 2, of the four species, the introduced grass species definitively demonstrates the lowest per acre break-even price finding when grown using efficient agronomic management. In contrast, the native grass mix demonstrates a relatively lower yield and a substantially higher break-even price, at $315.35 per acre, even with efficient agronomic practices. Increases in two key costs, diesel fuel and irrigation water, not unexpectedly, directly affect production costs. Regardless of the scenario, producers with capital equipment constraints finding incur approximately 20% higher break-even prices due to reduced yields. The crop enterprise budget tool quantitatively shows how changing different input parameters affects potential profitability. While aggregate growth in an economy may improve the welfare of both wealthy and poor households, the latter are most usually rural, and rural households have employment and incomes that depend disproportionately on agriculture. It is natural to wonder if growth in aggregate agricultural income has a different effect on the welfare of poorer households than does growth elsewhere in the economy. The question is an important one for many policy issues. Faced with continuing extensive poverty, many development agencies and scholars have suggested the need to refocus growth on agriculture finding, arguing that the alternatives of redistributing income generated outside of agriculture or migration out of agriculture to urban areas are difficult to achieve and create other problems. Of course, we are not the first to wonder whether growth in agriculture may be more effective than growth in the rest of the economy in reducing poverty; an extensive theoretical and empirical literature already exists on the subject which we discuss in Section 2. The theoretical literature focuses on the different transmission mechanisms of an exogenous gain in agricultural productivity on poverty, while the empirical literature analyzes the reduced form relationship, and generally documents a stronger association between poverty reduction and growth originating in agriculture compared to growth originating in non-agriculture, with the exception of Latin American countries. In this paper we tackle this question by comparing changes in the level and distribution of household expenditures due to growth in both aggregate agricultural and aggregate non-agricultural income.

The challenges facing the Air Resources Board are not completely uncharted

Livestock production is the agricultural sub-sector with the highest emissions and in turn with the highest potential for mitigation finding. It uses approximately 37% of the state’s agricultural land finding, and it generated 61% of California’s agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in 2009. The remaining 63% of agricultural land is used for field, fruit and nut crops; these crops generated 30% of the state’s agricultural emissions in 2009 due to fertilizer use, soil preparation and disturbances, and the burning of crop residue. Fuel used for agricultural activities contributed the remaining 8%. Since agriculture represents a significant portion of both the state’s economy and greenhouse gas emissions, it is not surprising that it offers considerable mitigation opportunities. The Climate Action Team finding, the government agency responsible for implementing California’s global warming emission reduction programs, estimated that agriculture’s annual greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by 9.1 million MtCO2e per year if the emission reduction strategies were fully implemented finding. The mitigation potential for agriculture is comprised of nine strategies, each of which contains identified activities for implementation finding. The most significant strategies concern the uses of biomass: Converting manure to energy could generate annual reductions of 1 million MtCO2e and using other types of agricultural biomass another 2.3 million MtCO2e. Other important strategies concern carbon sequestration. When plants photosynthesize, they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into organic carbon, which is used in the production of plant biomass; for example, leaves, wood, roots or root exudates.

When leaves fall, stacking pots roots secrete or plants die, this carbon can be removed from active cycling and stored, or sequestered, in the soil if it is protected from microbial decomposition finding. Consequently, carbon sequestration can be achieved by farm scaping — planting trees, shrubs and grasses in hedgerows, which removes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and contributes to the formation of soil complexes that fix carbon. Carbon sequestration in soils and plants could save 2.5 million MtCO2e — 1.5 million MtCO2e from farm scaping finding and another 1.0 million MtCO2e in soils finding. Although the Board proposed a livestock protocol and rules on fuel use that might support several strategies, significant hurdles prevent implementation of many of the strategy activities. In its AB 32 analysis, the Climate Action Team noted that methodologies for more than half of the agricultural strategies were not in place, in part because of a lack of scientific research finding. This situation accounts for much of the difference — approximately 25%, or 2.8 million MtCO2e — between potential reductions for 2020 if the strategies were implemented and reductions deemed feasible by that year finding.There has been considerable experimentation on how to structure agricultural projects that reduce emissions or sequester carbon, beginning with voluntary pilot projects under the auspices of the United Nations finding. Particularly relevant are thousands of projects operating under the Clean Development Mechanism, which promotes technology transfer and private and public investments in emission reduction and sequestration projects in developing countries.

The Clean Development Mechanism is a project-based provision of the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement linked to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change finding, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance welfare in developing countries. Credits generated by these projects can be used to meet pledged emission reduction commitments under the UNFCCC. The structure is analogous to the California Air Resources Board’s proposed program, which allows independent entities to create offsets that regulated firms can use. For example, since agriculture is an unregulated sector under the California program, a livestock farmer could potentially capture livestock methane emissions, receive offset credits for the voluntary emission reduction, and in turn sell them to a regulated entity such as a concrete manufacturing facility in need of additional carbon allowances. Central to the Clean Development Mechanism are its technical blueprints, called methodologies, which lay out rules for calculating the number of credits granted for specific mitigation activities. Overall, the Clean Development Mechanism has successfully attracted project investments finding, though it has been more effective in some agricultural mitigation activities than others finding. Agricultural mitigation projects, those that convert organic waste products to energy and limit methane emissions, have been successful under the Clean Development Mechanism, but land-use projects have not been successful under the Clean Development Mechanism in its current form. Land-use projects are defined as the total human arrangements, activities, and inputs undertaken in a certain land cover type to achieve purposes for which land is managed, such as crop production, grazing, timber extraction and conservation. Land-use forestry projects are those associated with decreasing emissions through avoiding deforestation, improving forest management and increasing the uptake of carbon finding. The Clean Development Mechanism has an extensive agricultural project base with a set of established standards and rigorous, peer-reviewed methodologies to ensure that the offsets are real, additional and verifiable finding.

This large stock of already completed methodologies can provide guidance as the Air Resources Board and Climate Action Team develop California’s implementation rules and protocols. In particular, it could hasten their progress by providing methods of quantification for particular processes that would otherwise need extensive research. For example, one of the hurdles for implementing farm scape sequestration is uncertainty about its potential to sequester carbon and whether this potential is significant enough to merit the development of a measurement methodology finding. In addition, the analysis cites the difficulty in quantifying the carbon content of woody shrubs as an obstacle to including the simple practice of planting shrubs in hedgerows between crops as an AB 32 strategy. The Clean Development Mechanism has an approved baseline and monitoring methodology finding for reforestation and afforestation, defined as the establishment or re-establishment of forest cover finding. And it has researched the carbon sequestration potential of planting trees and shrubs in hedgerows and states that the resulting carbon pools are significant finding. The methodology contains equations for woody shrubs as well as equations for measuring net greenhouse gas removal by sinks, another scientific hurdle mentioned by the Climate Action Team in regard to implementing agricultural carbon sequestration projects finding. Soil carbon dynamics is an ongoing research topic, and its biological and physical mechanisms are not well understood finding, but the Clean Development Mechanism project methodologies could help California realize its 2020 regulatory targets. Agricultural projects in the Kyoto Protocol include implementation opportunities and solutions to hurdles that are relevant to tapping mitigation potential in California agriculture. Those charged with implementing AB 32 must find instruments that are both economically efficient and environmentally effective. In the case of the Clean Development Mechanism, environmental integrity is subject to specific supervision rules and a series of checks along the project cycle by the UNFCCC Secretariat. To start, an international supervisory group, known as the CDM Executive Board, must approve methodologies for establishing baselines on behalf of the UNFCCC. Approved methodologies are published, and project developers can consult them. However, projects relying on new methods face the additional task of gaining approval. In either case, whether new or established methods are employed, developers must also convince the CDM Executive Board that their project methodology has been appropriately applied.

The project cycle also contains checks carried out by an independent firm or organization that has been accredited by the CDM Executive Board. This entity, known as a designated operational entity finding, initially validates the baseline design and the project’s plan to monitor and measure outcomes. This occurs before the project is registered — that is, officially recognized by the CDM Executive Board. For large projects, a separate independent entity carries out the project’s monitoring protocol, the process by which emissions or sequestrations are measured.In the context of the Clean Development Mechanism, we define an agricultural project as one that uses agricultural residuals, outputs or processes to directly or indirectly reduce greenhouse gas emissions finding. This includes projects that sequester carbon in soils. We studied a dataset described by Larson et al. finding that covers 5,824 projects finding, based on data reported by Risoe finding. Of these, 1,022 projects finding were classified as agricultural, land-use or forestry projects. Examples of such projects include the Assisted Natural Regeneration of Degraded Lands in Albania finding and the Moldova Soil Conservation Project finding. The Albania project was designed to transform badly eroded lands into broad leaf forests of native species. The primary objective of the project in Moldova is to conserve and improve the productivity of agricultural soils by planting shrubs and trees. The project is expected to generate other benefits,sawtooth greenhouse including global biodiversity and fuel wood and other forestry products for nearby communities. Based on Risoe’s analysis, the agricultural projects are expected to reduce business-as-usual emissions by nearly 220 million MtCO2e by 2012 and 582 million MtCO2e by 2020. Available estimates of CO2 emissions finding suggest that total global annual emissions were 30.0 and 37.8 GtCO2e finding in 1990 and 2005, respectively. The main methodologies used for these 1,022 projects were extracted from Risoe’s project data and can be found in Dinar et al. finding. The projects rely on 33 approved methodologies finding, but the eight most frequently used methodologies account for 80% of the projects finding. While each project must meet the specific criteria stated in each methodology, a closer look at the most widely used methodologies suggests that they are composed of variations around a small set of core mitigation activities. The most widely used mitigation activity displaces fossil fuels with alternative fuels from agricultural biomass or processes. Examples include the generation of electricity by burning agricultural waste and the generation of mechanical energy via irrigation. The second most widely used mitigation activity is avoiding the release of methane and other greenhouse gases, or recovering them by modifying anaerobic decomposition systems for manure or agriculturally derived organic matter finding. These two core mitigation activities already in place on a number of the state’s farms could be adopted in California. They would encourage better management of manure, as well as the displacement of fossil fuels. However, Clean Development Mechanism methodologies are less well developed in areas associated with other important AB 32 strategies, including crop growing and harvesting, and soil preparation and disturbances.

Consequently, methodological hurdles will remain in the short run, making it difficult to tap mitigation opportunities in these areas.Missing methodologies are also holding back international mitigation efforts. The Clean Development Mechanism taps only a small portion of the mitigation potential in the agricultural sectors of developing countries. For example, Larson et al. finding calculated that the 1,022 agricultural and land-use forestry projects studied amounted to a little more than 3% of the mitigation potential identified in the most recent Integovernmental Panel on Climate Change finding report finding. Larson et al. finding note several generous assumptions in their calculations and surmised that their estimate represents an upper bound. In the case of the Clean Development Mechanism, much of the mitigation gap likely arises from missing methodologies for land-use projects. Mitigation activities for these projects include the restoration of degraded land, better management of crop and pasture land, and the appropriate use of fertilizers. Research summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finding suggests that these activities have the largest mitigation potential for the agricultural sector globally and thus for achieving AB 32 goals as well.The appropriate roles for land-use projects in international mitigation efforts were contentiously debated as the Kyoto Protocol and the Clean Development Mechanism were crafted finding. And, in the rules that eventually emerged, the projects faced special limitations, in large part because of the nature of land-use mitigation. The activities are mostly straightforward and readily observed, for example, the adoption of conservation tillage methods or the addition of organic material to degraded soils. The likely benefits and processes generating them are easy to list as well. But measuring precisely the net effects, which are needed to assign credits, is challenging, and the related science is complex. Moreover, even well-measured effects are potentially reversible under many settings. For example, the mechanisms controlling soil organic carbon finding dynamics are imperfectly understood finding, so even meticulously inventoried carbon stocks have the potential to be re-emitted back into the atmosphere if temperature, precipitation or any other of the myriad variables affecting soil organic carbon dynamics happen to change. This difficulty creates skepticism about the environmental integrity of land use projects and increases monitoring costs, which encourages potential investors to favor alternative projects.

Previous meta-analyses have also examined various aspects of N2O emissions from conservation tillage

The large N2O emissions from agricultural lands are of particular concern given both its high global warming potential relative to CH4 and CO2 and its contribution to stratospheric ozone depletion.Conservation tillage, including no-tillage and reduced tillage management, is increasingly being adopted on agricultural lands worldwide.About 10% of global arable lands, i.e.∼125 million hectares, are currently managed using conservation tillage.The adoption of conservation tillage has demonstrated important benefits for soil carbon sequestration in topsoil, soil erosion, soil quality and crop yields.However, there is considerable debate concerning the effects of conservation tillage on climate change mitigation due to the highly variable effects of conservation tillage on N2O emissions.Various studies found increase , decrease , and no differences in N2O emissions resulting from adoption of conservation tillage practices.These inconsistent effects may be associated with the duration of conservation tillage practices with short-term application reported to stimulate N2O emission while long-term application decreases N2O emission.Additionally, climate regimes and various soil properties are reported to have a strong effect on soil N2O emission.Soil N2O emission primarily results from nitrification and denitrification processes in soil.Under relatively aerobic conditions, NH4+ is converted to NO3− along with N2O emission by autotrophic nitrifiers, In contrast, under anaerobic conditions, heterotrophic denitrifiers convert NO3− to N2O and N2.Soil aeration status is a dominant factor controlling nitrification and denitrification processes and their potential N2O production.In addition,hydroponic nft soil physical and chemical properties, such as soil texture, pH, organic content, clay content, etc., play significant roles in N2O emission dynamics.

For instance, fine-textured soils often have higher N2O emissions than coarse-textured soils due to slower O2 diffusion rates leading to lower soil O2 concentrations that favor denitrification.However, other studies have shown lower N2O emission from fine-textured soils as low gas diffusivity allowed greater time for more complete reduction of N2O to N2.Higher microbially-labile organic matter contents also favor enhanced denitrification by providing substrate for heterotrophic denitrifier growth, which leads to more rapid O2 consumption.High N2O emission may also be favored in alkaline soils due to more suitable growth conditions for both nitrifiers and denitrifiers.Furthermore, agricultural practices, such as N fertilization, crop species, crop rotation and water management may have strong influences on N2O emission.Numerous studies have investigated the impacts of soil properties and agricultural practices on soil N2O emissions in conservation tillage systems and found diverse and contradictory results that hinder the overall assessment of conservation tillage impacts on climate change mitigation.Van Kessel et al.investigated changes in N2O emission in response to different categorical conservation tillage practices and found strong influences from the duration of conservation practices and climate regimes.Their meta analysis focused on the magnitude of N2O emission under contrasting conservation tillage regimes, but did not consider specific soil properties and widely-used agricultural practices.Zhao et al.analyzed the relationship between specific-conditions and greenhouse gas emissions in no-till farming systems using meta-regression based on a regional database in China, but this analysis was limited in scale.

A detailed assessment of the influence of conservation tillage practices on soil N2O emission is critical to determine the potential for conservation tillage practices to mitigate climate change.This study aimed to assess the effects of conservation tillage on soil N2O emission relative to conventional tillage by conducting a meta-analysis of peer reviewed field studies.Specifically, we attempt to address the following questions: i) How do climate regime and experimental duration affect soil N2O emissions following application of conservation tillage practices? ii) Do initial soil properties affect the response of N2O emission to conservation tillage practices? and iii) Can agricultural practices mitigate N2O emission associated with conservation tillage? This comprehensive meta-analysis is significant for developing strategies for the future expansion of conservation tillage and for enhancing agricultural practices to mitigate greenhouse gas emission from agricultural lands.Conservation tillage is promoted as an effective method for carbon sequestration and thus a possible mitigation strategy for climate change.However, considerable controversy exists concerning how conservation tillage affects soil N2O emissions, which may offset potential carbon-related climate change mitigation benefits.N2O emissions are primarily controlled by the microbiological processes of nitrification and denitrification.Whereas the heterotrophic denitrification process occurs under anaerobic conditions, nitrification is an aerobic process.Therefore, the integrated effects of soil physical, chemical and biological factors, such as soil aeration, pH, temperature, moisture, texture and substrate availability, function together to affect soil N2O emission dynamics.Furthermore, agricultural practices, such as irrigation, fertilization and cropping systems, play important direct/indirect roles in soil N2O emissions.Given the wide range of integrative factors affecting N2O emissions, a comprehensive meta-analysis can provide a powerful approach for gaining important insights into the importance of specific factors regulating N2O emission across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.Overall, the implementation of conservation tillage significantly affected soil N2O emission in this meta-analysis ; however, non-significant differences were observed for different conservation tillage practices.

These results are consistent with an analysis by Van Kessel et al..Meta-regression results indicated some detailed information concerning differences in no-tillage versus reduced tillage practices on soil N2O emission.At the initiation of conservation tillage, soil compaction can moderate soil aeration and stimulate N2O emission through denitrification.However, substrate limitation suppressed this initial stimulation leading to decreased N2O emission over time.With retention of residues, sufficient substrate is available to support the N2O-producing heterotrophic microbial community.With sufficient substrate availability, soil aeration becomes a dominant factor regulating N2O emission in conservation tillage systems.As shown in Fig.6b, N2O emission rate was regulated by the interactions of conservation tillage and soil texture.N2O emission in both conservation tillage practices displayed a significant positive correlation in the fine particle size classes , which was consistent with the higher N2O emissions in fine-textured soils observed by Choudhary et al..Conservation tillage may improve bulk density and water holding capacity, especially in the fine-textured soils which are prone to generate anaerobic microsite hot spots for N2O production in otherwise aerobic soils.Significant differences were recorded in conservation tillage induced soil N2O emissions among climate regimes.Temperature and precipitation are the primary factors regulating N2O emission across climate regimes.A significant negative correlation was recorded between effect size and precipitation , consistent with the findings of Van Kessel et al.who reported a larger mean effect size in dry climates than humid climates upon implementation of reduced tillage.Increasing amounts of precipitation lead to higher soil moisture and lower soil oxygen concentrations, which strongly regulate nitrification and denitrification dynamics.Higher water-fill pore space was observed in no-tillage systems compared to conventional tillage during the dry season, but no difference was observed during the normal wet portion of the year.WFPS differences were more pronounced between tillage practices under lower precipitation scenarios, which resulted from increased denitrification induced N2O emission in conservation tillage relative to conventional tillage.In addition, the N2O emission effect size showed a weak positive correlation with temperature , which was further supported by the higher increase of N2O emissions in tropical and warm temperate climate regimes.These findings are similar to those found by Zhao et al..Nitrification is favored at optimal soil temperature and moisture conditions of 25–40 °C and WFPS of 30–70%, respectively.Within the optimal conditions, nitrifier activities are enhanced with increasing soil temperature leading to the potential for increased soil N2O emissions.However, contradictory results have shown higher N2O emissions from soils in conventional tillage versus no-tillage with increasing temperature.

Conservation tillage-induced N2O emissions were affected by experimental duration.Short- to medium-term implementation of conservation tillage significantly increased soil N2O emission, especially in the first 3 years following the initiation of conservation tillage.However, a negative mean effect size was measured for studies with long-term experimental duration.Similar changes in N2O emissions with duration of conservation tillage were reported by Six et al., with an increase of N2O emissions in the first 10 years and a decrease thereafter.These changes associated with duration of conservation tillage may be attributed to attainment of new steady-state soil conditions,hydroponic channel such as soil structure, compaction, WFPS and aeration, which are not optimal for soil microbes to produce N2O by denitrification and/or nitrification processes.Soil N2O emissions are strongly correlated with soil denitrification nitrification processes that are driven by soil microbes, which in turn are largely affected by several soil properties.SOC and generalized soil texture had no significant differences on N2O emissions following implementation of conservation tillage.A trend of increasing N2O emission with increasing SOC content was reported by Li et al..High SOC provides more substrate for heterotrophic denitrifiers, which should favor enhanced denitrification and N2O emissions.Soil texture strongly affects soil aeration and thus is often implicated as an important factor regulating N2O emissions.As nitrification is considered to be the dominant process generating N2O in generally well aerated, coarse-textured soils , application of conservation tillage in these soils may result in soil compaction and poor aeration, suppressing nitrification and its associated N2O emissions.In contrast, denitrification is often the primary N2Ogenerating process in fine-textured soils due to a generally higher prevalence of anoxic microsites.Therefore, application of conservation tillage to fine-textured soils may result in the development of additional anaerobic conditions through compaction and greater water retention owing to the higher micropore content of compacted soils, which favor the development of additional anaerobic microsites for denitrification.Soil pH and clay content were identified to significantly affect the N2O emission effect size from the implementation of conservation tillage.Our analysis indicated a significant increase of N2O emissions in acidic and alkaline soils but not in neutral soils.Greater N2O emissions in acidic soils have been previously reported.In acidic soils, stepwise denitrification was purported to be suppressed by an attenuation of reductase activities that hinder N2O conversion to N2, resulting in the accumulation of N2O in acidic soils.In contrast, nitrifiers generally perform better in neutral to slightly alkaline soils , which may contribute to increased N2O emissions in alkaline soils.The effect of clay content on N2O emission in our analysis contradicts the expectations of increasing N2O emission with increasing clay content.The significant increase of N2O emission in soils with low clay content was mostly associated with medium-textured soils, which was consistent with the results of our soil texture evaluation.However, the sample size for low clay content soils was small, which could bias the results.More comparisons are necessary for a rigorous exploration of the effect of clay content on soil N2O emission in conservation tillage systems.

As expected, increasing N application rates led to increased N2O emissions.Similar results were reported from short term trials evaluating the influence of N application on N2O emissions in Mediterranean soils.Enhanced inorganic N from fertilization would be expected to intensify nitrification-denitrification processes resulting in increased N2O production.A linear response of N2O emission to N application rate was identified when the N fertilizer rate was less or equal to that required to achieve maximum crop yield, while an exponential increase in N2O emission was observed in soils with higher N inputs.Contrasting water management practices showed a significant in- fluence on soil N2O emission in conservation tillage systems.Irrigation significantly increased soil N2O emissions, consistent with the findings of Cayuela et al..The drying and wetting cycles created by irrigation provide an ideal environment for coupled nitrification denitrification.Nitrate production during the dry period is available for denitrification when irrigation increases the WFPS leading to potential anaerobic conditions.A significant difference was found between residue retained and residue removed treatments following implementation of conservation tillage, consistent with the report by Baggs et al..Retention of residues provides substrate for microbial growth through mineralization, which should increase denitrifier and nitrifier abundance depending on oxygen content.Inorganic N released from residue by mineralization would further stimulate the N2O production processes.Finally, consumption of soil O2 from enhanced organic matter decomposition may contribute to a greater prevalence of anaerobic conditions that favor denitrification.Our analysis indicated that crop rotation reduced N2O emission from conservation tillage as compared to non-rotation systems.Previously, no significant effect of crop rotation on N2O emission was found by Omonode et al..As our analysis indicated a relatively weak significance level for crop rotation effects on soil N2O emission dynamics, further investigations are warranted to better understand the complex interactions between crop rotation and N2O emission.Our meta-analysis showed a crop-specific effect on conservation tillage induced N2O emissions.The higher N2O emissions from maize, wheat and rice may be related to the higher N fertilizer application rates for these crops as compared to the lower and insignificant effects from beans and other crop types that generally receive lower N fertilization rates.The relatively small increase of N2O emissions determined in rice paddies following conservation tillage was similar to that reported by Zhang et al.and is possibly due to the dominance of anaerobic conditions that favor complete denitrification and thus a lower yield of N2O relative to N2.

How might private and state-owned enterprises differentially affect other markets?

The authors report that the US government had no intentions for the firms other than as investors, and intended from the beginning to sell off the firms.Because subsidies and other soft budget constraints were not applied to these firms, and firm ownership was perceived to be transferrable, efficiency differences between ownership types were likely diminished relative to other cases in competitive markets.The authors further argue that the state-owned firms were monitored using mechanisms comparable to those in the private sector firms comprising their comparison group, reducing any agency issues that may have already been mitigated by the competitive markets within which the firms operated.Isik and Hassan are unique in being the only study to report that public firms were more efficient than private firms.The authors use measures of cost and technical efficiency to evaluate ownership effects among Turkish banks, and use non-traditional outputs to construct their measures, such as the number of letters of guarantee issued, and the number of loan commitments provided, thereby avoiding price sensitive data in their calculations.A broad overview of the empirical literature across the spectrum of competitive environments suggests that ownership differences appear to diminish in more highly competitive environments.Detailed examination reveals complexities that both sharpen this result, and provide a more nuanced understanding of the theoretical issues that drive efficiency differences between ownership types.Boylaud and Nicoletti provide an example of how, because privatizations may be announced at one time and executed at another time, some “ownership”effects may occur prior to actual ownership.Additionally, a closer look at Wallsten shows that price regulation common in monopolies can create effects similar to competition, so that firms existing in a non-competitive environment can display some of the efficiency characteristics of competitive firms.

While both of these studies find no efficiency effects to ownership alone, they each provide evidence that the entire process of privatization provides efficiency benefits,hydroponic gutter some of which occur prior to the the ownership transfer and after typical regulations are applied.In competitive environments, although 3 of the 7 studies reviewed find that private firms outperform state-owned firms, none of the 3 studies that avoided price-sensitive measures found this result.While this is by no means conclusive, it may suggest that this study’s criteria for competitive environments are not so stringent as to prevent a certain amount of price-setting behavior, so that price-sensitive measures of efficiency in this environment could reflect revenue increases.Accounting for these details strengthens the evidence that increased competition reduces efficiency differences between public and private ownership.According to theory, this implies that, as competition increases, reductions in agency issues have a positive effect on the relative efficiency of state-owned firms that dominates the negative effect from increasing reliance on soft budget constraints.However, the evidence suggests that this may be true only because soft budget constraints are not increasingly relied upon as competition increases, rather than because their effects are insignificant.Amongst non-competitive firms, there is evidence of soft budget constraints in 3 of the 7 studies; in competitive firms, none report any evidence of soft budget constraints.The reason for this deviation from theoretical expectations may be the prevalence of price regulations among monopolies in our sample of studies, which compel both private and public firms to supply at prices and quantities that might otherwise be found at much higher levels of competition.When assessing whether private or public firm ownership is more beneficial to society, the consensus has shifted over time.In the early and mid-20th century, both theoreticians and policymakers emphasized the potential for social losses in privatized markets due to market failures such as monopolistic pricing and externalities, and saw state ownership as a cure for these problems.In the last few decades, the argument that private firms are more innovative and efficient has held sway.Moreover, the theoretical foundations for state ownership have been weakened by the notion that regulation can solve market failures and achieve any distributional goals of the state by controlling the undesirable actions of private firms, while still allowing them sufficient freedom to innovate.However, unless policymakers can fully anticipate the behaviors of private firms, regulations may alter incentives for profit maximization in ways that lead to unintended consequences.In this paper, I study how private and state-owned sugar mills differentially affect the outcomes of farmers who grow both sugar cane and other crops, in Tamil Nadu, India.

Because the activities of sugar mills are highly monitored and regulated within the market for sugar cane, I posit that private sugar mills may pursue profits through less-regulated channels, such as discouraging substitute activities for their vendors by making it less profitable to grow other crops.In the setting of this study, private firms have both a motive and a potential means to affect the profitability of substitute activities.Sugar mills have high returns to scale, and benefit from increasing the quantity of raw sugar cane they receive from farmers.In addition, a regulatory system in the state assigns a zone to each sugar mill, within which it has exclusive rights to purchase sugar cane from farmers, and outside of which it cannot purchase sugar cane.While the zoning system is intended to provide an incentive for mills to increase the productivity of existing sugar cane farmers within its zone3 , it also increases incentives for mills to discourage farmers in their zones from growing other crops in lieu of sugar cane.Because private mills typically have relationships with large agricultural conglomerates that supply inputs to crops other than sugar cane, they may plausibly act on these incentives by influencing the costs or availability of inputs to grow other crops.Tamil Nadu’s zoning system not only provides a case study of how private firms react to regulatory constraints differently from state-owned firms; it also serves as the source of identification in this paper.By studying households who grow crops near the borders between state-owned and private mill zones, I am able to compare the effects of public and private mills on farmers who otherwise exist in the same geographic and policy environments.I employ a regression discontinuity design to identify outcome differences that occur at the border, and test soil quality and other determinants of farming outcomes to verify that borders are not endogenously placed.I find that crops other than sugar cane have substantially higher costs and lower profits in private zones than in state-owned zones, although sugar cane outcomes are not significantly affected by sugar mill ownership differences.My findings suggest that private sugar mills discourage farmers from pursuing substitute activities to growing sugar cane, in order to increase the supply of inputs to mills.Only a handful of papers examine the differential impacts of private and state-owned firms empirically, perhaps because of the difficulty of finding settings in which ownership effects can be identified.Frydman et al find that private firms are associated with higher employment levels, using data on state and privatized firms across transitional economies in Central Europe.Duggan studies private for-profit, private not-for-profit, and state-owned hospitals, and finds no difference in low-income patient health outcomes between ownership types.

The closest study to this paper is conducted by Mullainathan and Sukhtankar , who study how public and private sugar mills differentially impact sugar cane growers using the same identification strategy, and find small consumption gains among sugar cane growers who sell to private mills.However, none of these studies examine the effects of ownership differences on other related markets, and thus potentially overlook impacts resulting from private firms’ attempts to avoid regulatory scrutiny.This paper makes a unique contribution to the literature by examining the differential effects of state-owned and private firms on substitute markets for their vendors,U planting gutter and finds evidence that ownership structure can, indeed, have large impacts on vendors in these markets.This suggests that papers studying the effects of ownership on the economy may neglect important outcomes by constraining their analysis to the market of treatment.The study also employs an unusually clean identification of public and private ownership effects, as it compares the effects of publicly- and privately-owned firms on farmers who grow crops in otherwise similar environments, but must sell sugar cane only to a state-owned or private mill, respectively.In addition, the paper examines the consequences of a zoning policy common in India and other developing countries, and presents findings that broadly demonstrate how private firms might respond differently to regulations than state-owned firms.Lastly, the survey conducted to gather data for this paper contributes a novel dataset of farmer characteristics, growing practices, crop choices, and outcomes in rural India.The paper proceeds as follows: In Section 2.2, I discuss relevant theoretical differences between state-owned and private enterprises, and how they affect predicted outcomes in related markets.I also provide contextual information about farming in Tamil Nadu, and about sugar cane in particular.In Section 2.3, I describe my data and the regression discontinuity design I use for identification, along with identification concerns and how I address them.Section 2.4 discusses my analysis and results, and provides some explanations for what I find.To answer this question, I begin with a discussion of theoretical differences between private and state owned firms.It is commonly held that the goal of private firms is the maximal attainment of profits, while state-owned firms may have a variety of bottom lines, such as maximizing total gains to society, redistributing wealth amongst their stakeholders, or providing services that would not otherwise be provided by private enterprise.The arguments for state-owned firms are as varied as their potential goals: they may be intended to reduce social losses due to market failures, to promote social values, or to provide services deemed essential that may otherwise be neglected by the private sector.

However, these arguments – along with the distinction between private and state-owned firms – are dimmed somewhat by the ability of governments to regulate industries.If governments are able to perfectly specify their goals in contracts or regulations, then private firms that abide by their stipulations would fulfill any goals that state-owned firms are intended to accomplish.In practice, contracts and regulations may be incomplete, if governments cannot anticipate exactly what they wish to accomplish, or cannot completely specify how a firm must achieve these goals.Grossman, Hart, and Moore develop a theory of incomplete contracts that observes that the gaps in an incompletely specified contract allow firms the flexibility to make decisions that serve their own ends.Analogously, incomplete regulations give leeway to firms wherever laws do not specify how they must conduct business.These observations can be adapted to provide a more nuanced distinction between public and private sector firms in a regulated environment: While private firms are free to pursue profit maximization wherever regulations or government contracts do not specify how they must behave, state-owned firms can be thought of as completely regulated, and thus forced to act narrowly within the expectations of the government.Then, the difference between private and state-owned firms is the scope of activities that each can undertake to maximize profits, while fulfilling the regulatory obligations imposed upon it by a government.While this flexibility afforded to private firms can encourage innovation and efficiency, it may also lead to outcomes that were not envisioned by the government.In particular, since firms can profit from influencing related markets such as the substitute markets for their vendors, private firms may respond to regulations that constrain their within-market operations by increasing their activities in related markets, if they are less regulated.Scientists and policy makers in the international community, in both developing and developed countries, recognize the importance that agricultural technology and its extension has played in promoting the expansion of supply and increased productivity in the world over the past 30 years.Rosegrant and Evenson have documented the importance of new varieties and extension effort on Indian total factor productivity.Pingali, Hussein, and Gerpacio review the contributions made by the Green Revolution in South and Southeast Asia.Although Rozelle, Huang and Rosegrant, Fan and Pardey, and Lin measure the impact of agricultural research investment on China’s agricultural output, no one has systematically analyzed the determinants of total factor productivity.Understanding the process of technological impact on the productivity of food production in developing world’s largest country is important, since it is the main engine of production growth and increases in income from farming in countries after they have modernized their economies Past analyses, however, mostly have two shortcomings, both of which have limited the ability to closely investigate the way technology affects productivity.First, researchers typically have focused on supply or yield response or production function analysis and have not examined the impact on total factor productivity and, with the exception of Rosegrant and Evenson, the analysis has been highly aggregated, across states or provinces and especially across crops.Second, the research methods and measures of technological inputs also have limited the explanatory power of research analyzing the impact of research and extension investment.