Many challenges currently facing agriculture require longterm data on landscape-scale hydrologic responses to weather, such as from the Goodwater Creek Experimental Watershed (GCEW), located in northeastern Missouri, USA. This watershed is prone to surface runoff despite shallow slopes, as a result of a significant smectitic clay layer 30 to 50 cm deep that restricts downward flow of water and gives rise to a periodic perched water table. This paper is the first in a series that documents the database developed from GCEW. The objectives of this paper are to (i) establish the context of long-term data and the federal infrastructure that provides it, (ii) describe the GCEW/ Central Mississippi River Basin (CMRB) establishment and the geophysical and anthropogenic context, (iii) summarize in brief the collected research results published using data from within GCEW, (iv) describe the series of papers this work introduces, and (v) identify knowledge gaps and research needs. The rationale for the collection derives from converging trends in data from longterm research, integration of multiple disciplines, and increasing public awareness of increasingly larger problems. The outcome of those trends includes being selected as the CMRB site in the USDA-ARS Long-Term Agro-Ecosystem Research (LTAR) network. Research needs include quantifying watershed scale fluxes of N, P, K, sediment, and energy, accounting for fluxes involving forest, livestock, and anthropogenic sources, scaling from nearterm point-scale results to increasingly long and broad scales, and considering whole-system interactions. This special section informs the scientific community about this database and provides support for its future use in research to solve natural resource problems important to US agricultural, environmental, and science policy.

This study investigates productive efficiency for a sample of Missouri crop-only (specialized) and integrated crop-livestock (diversified) farms using a cost frontier approach. Results suggest that significant cost inefficiency exists among sample farms. Lower cost efficiency in both types of farms was attributed to improper scale of operations and misallocation of inputs. On average, diversified farms were as technically and scale efficient as specialized farms. Lower allocative efficiency diluted gains in technical efficiency and resulted in greater cost inefficiency for diversified farms than for specialized farms. Technical efficiency was independent of farm size, whereas allocative, scale, and scope efficiencies were not.

Demand supply, and price relationships in the dairy sector were measured for the 1950–1968 period by two‐stage least squares. Actual cow numbers adjusted more quickly to desired levels than production per cow. Own price elasticities of milk supply and consumer demands for fluid and manufactured milk were not statistically significant.

This paper evaluates the economic and environmental tradeoffs at watershed scale by incorporating both economic and environmental risks in agricultural production. The Target MOTAD model is modified by imposing a probability-constrained objective function to capture the yield uncertainty caused by random allocation of farming systems to soil types and by introducing environmental targets to incorporate environmental risk due to random storm events. This framework is used to determine the tradeoff frontier between watershed net return and sediment yield and nitrogen concentration in runoff in Goodwater Creek watershed, Missouri. The frontier is significantly affected by environmental risk preference.

Returns to scale and input elasticities are estimated from cost functions based on standard and generalized Cobb‐Douglas production functions. Returns to scale increased up to 161 thousand tons and decreased thereafter. Elasticities were. 340 for labor, .285 for land, .351 for fertilizer, .113 for pesticides, and —.089 for machinery and equipment.