Journal Issue:
Agricultural Policy Review: Volume 2022, Issue 3
Agricultural Policy Review: Volume 2022, Issue 3
Volume
Number
Fall 2022
Issue Date
2022
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Journal Volume
Journal Volume
Articles
Publication
Conservation Investment and Carbon Payments in US Agriculture: Implications of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022
(
2022)
Conservation is essential for agricultural sustainability in order to preserve soil productivity and mitigate adverse impacts on ecosystems such as degraded water quality and wildlife habitats. It can be costly to adopt conservation practices that help sustain farm soil health in the long term but do not always generate a positive return for farmers in the short term (e.g., reduced tillage, cover crops). Furthermore, some conservation practices potentially improve off-farm environmental conditions but do not improve farm profitability (e.g., riparian buffers, wetland restoration). The United States has a long history of governmental investment in conservation to maintain the economic and environmental sustainability of agriculture. Recently, the pursuit of carbon neutrality has brought increased attention and funding to conservation in agriculture. This article briefly explores governmental conservation investment in agriculture and some key issues on its interactions with the fast-developing private carbon payment programs.
Publication
Electric Vehicles, Horses, Oats, and Ethanol. Does the last Transportation Revolution Reveal Anything about the Next One?
(
2022)
August 2022 was quite the month for energy-related headlines. First, Congress passed and President Biden signed into law both: (a) the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which is structured in part to reduce bottlenecks in semi-conductors that green energy businesses such as electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers had been facing; and, (b) a substantial package of green-energy stimulus in the Inflation Reduction Act (see the detailed discussion at the Center for Agricultural Law and Taxation). Coupled with the previously passed (November 2021) bi-partisan, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which includes funding to upgrade energy transmission and increase vehicle chargers, both urban and rural areas should see significant developments in clean energy transportation infrastructure.
Publication
Agricultural Projections into 2023
(
2022)
Autumn is a transition season in a variety of aspects—schools are fully back in session, college football fires up another season, and agricultural markets shift their focus. For crops, the focus moves from supplies to usage, and for livestock, the market chatter often delves into the outlook for the upcoming year.
Publication
The Tillage Input: Technical Change, Markets, and Policy
(
2022)
Tillage, the act of cultivating soil in order to improve crop growing conditions, is closely associated with the emergence of settled societies. Critical for food security, incentivized by crop sector profitability, and implicated in environmental degradation events such as the US Dust Bowl era, the activity has long been matter for public policy. Our intent here is to highlight recent developments in supply and demand for the activity as well as public interest in overseeing whether and how soil cultivation occurs.
Publication
Increasing Local Production of Table Food in Iowa to Improve Agricultural Sustainability: A Food-Energy-Water Systems (FEWS) Project Case Study
(
2022)
In 2021, harvested crop areas accounted for over 24 million acres of land in Iowa. More than 94% of this area was dedicated to production of just two commodity crops: corn and soybeans (USDA-NASS 2022). In spite of Iowa’s productive landscape, the state is a net table food (for direct human consumption) importer, with approximately 95% of table food grown elsewhere (Stone, Thompson, and Rosentrater 2021). As the human population of Iowa becomes more concentrated in urban areas, the opportunities to expand local table food production to meet nutritional, environmental, and social sustainability targets in these places increase. The ongoing Iowa UrbanFEWS project (Thompson et al. 2021) focuses on identifying opportunities to increase table food production in the six-county Des Moines Metropolitan Statistical Area (DMMSA) in Iowa.