Since the 1930s, federal policy has exerted significant indirect influence on cropland values through capitalization of benefits from commodity supply control programs. Several studies have used a variety of data and approaches to provide the limited quantitative estimates of the extent to which the benefits of access to federal farm program payments are capitalized into cropland values (e.g., Duffy et al.; Goodwin and Ortalo-Magne; Herriges, Barickman, and Shogren; Just and Miranowski; Shoemaker, Anderson, and Hrubovcak). The issue continues to be pertinent at this time, especially given the enactment of the Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (FAIR), under which all federal commodity program payments are to be phased out by the end of 2002.The purpose of this paper is to measure the extent to which direct government payments are currently capitalized into cropland values, providing estimates of the amount by which cropland values could fall, ceteris paribus, as the result of FAIR. The analysis employs microlevel cropland values data from the redesigned USDA farmland values data collection effort and uses two related, but quite different, regression-based approaches, one the standard linear (parametric) estimator and the other a nonparametric estimator. The empirical results are preceded by a brief discussion of the' current policy setting and past research on the role of

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Metropolitan agriculture is not homogeneous. This paper delves beneath metropolitan county averages using data on individual farms in the Northeast classified into three statistically distinct types. A small group of adaptive farms profit from intensive production on smaller acreage to accommodate themselves to the urban environment. Traditional farms have increased costs and pressures on their more extensive operations without compensating increases in revenue from better-adapted enterprises. A large group of recreational farms subsidize small-farm activities from nonfarm income. Operating characteristics of each farm type are presented and their importance to metropolitan agriculture is assessed. Implications for preserving farming and farmland in the Northeast are drawn.

This article determines the relative technical efficiency of rural- and urban-influenced crop/livestock enterprises in the Corn Belt. Farmers in urban-influenced locations are less technically efficient than farmers in rural locations. During 1998–2000, stochastic production frontier procedures indicate that a 10% increase in urban influence leads to a close to 4% decrease in technical efficiency. The most successful urban-influenced farms have controlled costs as effectively as rural farms. They have tended to de-emphasize that nondairy livestock activities—particularly beef and hogs—do not rely extensively on off-farm income, and have relatively large, less residential/lifestyle operations compared to less successful urban-influenced farmers. However, our statistical analysis clearly bears out the refrain in popular literature that urban proximity raises the cost for, and decreases the viability of, traditional farms. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

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