Cotton farmers in the Piedmont region incorrectly believe conservation systems with winter cover crop and no-till cultivation yield less than conventional systems. We model the effect of organic matter on productivity and show how ignoring this effect causes returns to be underestimated. Farmers with imperfect information underinvest in residue management.

This paper studies bidder behavior in an innovative program in which farmers compete to sell their development rights to the State. We derive a reduced form bidding model that includes both private value and common value components. This model allows us to estimate the role of bidder competition, the winner’s curse correction, and the underlying distribution of private values. We find that competition reducelers adjust for a possible winner’s curse by increasing their bids by roughly 10 percent over their reservation values.

In this paper, we analyze the factors that influence t he productivity of maize among smallholder farmers, given that unfavourable output and input market conditions throughout the 1990s have compelled smallholder farmers into unsustainable agricultural intensification. We use farm-household survey data in order to compare the productivity of smallholder maize production under integrated (ISFM) and chemicalbased soil fertility management using a normalized translog yield response model.

The price of agricultural land and arable land is particularly low in Estonia when compared to Western European countries. The demand for agricultural land was low during the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet agriculture system. The situation is changing and the demand for agricultural land is increasing at the present time. Yet, simultaneously, the formation of arable land prices is not studied much. There are several factors affecting land prices and spatial characteristics are among them.

The ongoing processes in agriculture, and the national economy in general, as well as continuous targeted reconstruction of the European Union Common Agricultural and Rural Development Policy, and other processes of globalisation and international integration, steadily and directly resound to Latvia, and create new objectives related to the use of land. The agreement on rural development adopted during the European Union Salzburg Conference has also established or determined new functions for the use of land.

The fragmentation of landholdings is considered as disturbing factor for agriculture. The aim of this article is to evaluate the extent of land fragmentation of the large landholdings in Estonia. The Januszewski and Schmook indexes were calculated for that purpose. The detailed survey of three agricultural landholdings was conducted in order to assess the possibilities to reduce the land fragmentation and improve their land use conditions. Results showed that Estonian agricultural producers’ landholdings are considerably fragmented.

In the conditions of the Republic of Belarus there was shown the necessity of detection and recording of socially-significant sights and brand objects in the process of managing land resources. There was examined the classification of land plots and objects of real estate, which appear to be territory brands. There were determined the main approaches to the formation of the system of such objects on the basic level of state management.

This paper presents a case study of the economic damages to homeowners in a northern New Jersey community due to an exotic forest insect--the hemlock woolly adelgid. Hedonic property value methods are used to estimate the effect of hemlock health on property values. A statistically significant relationship between hemlock health and residential property values is established. Moreover, there are some signs of spillover impacts from hemlock decline, as negative effects are realized on the parcels where the declining hemlock stands are located as well as on neighboring properties.