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This article describes the collaborative efforts of various state and national agencies working together to recruit and retain agriculture teachers in the states of Kentucky, South Carolina, and Ohio. We contrast multiple measures of recruitment and retention in these states with those from the comparator states of Arkansas, West Virginia, and Alabama. The strategies outlined market to new agriculture teachers and maintain current teachers in the profession targeting work-life balance, emotional, physical and social health. These have been a focal point in the federal State Teach Ag Results (STAR) program, but the effects of participation in STAR on recruitment and retention require additional investigation. Using a difference-in-differences regression model, we assume parallel trends and no spillovers (SUTVA) between participating and non-participating states in the Southeastern US and Ohio Valley regions to model changes in multiple measures of recruitment and retention of agriculture teachers. We find a positive and significant effect of STAR participation on recruitment, an insignificantly positive effect of participation on retention, and an insignificantly negative impact of participation on creation of new agricultural positions in public schools. Our results suggest that recruitment is lagged behind existing positions, which necessitates further work investigating new policy aimed at filling those positions before creating any new ones.

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Growers have increasingly expressed frustration over the negative externalities created by their neighbor's production practices. These spatial agricultural network problems include issues such as cross‐pollination and herbicide drift. We develop novel methods for estimating parameters that allow us to adapt and apply general network diffusion models to these spatial agricultural network problems. Doing so allows us to calculate externality damage within a region and calculate cost‐effective policies for alleviating that externality. We empirically illustrate, motivate, and test this approach by applying it to hemp. We find that network structure is an important factor in externality size and cost‐effective policy response for spatial agricultural network problems. We also find that policies that are implemented early and proactively are more likely to be successful and cost effective than policies implemented retroactively. Finally, we find that in our application of limiting the cross‐pollination damage experienced by growers of feminized hemp from non‐feminized hemp growers, the most cost‐effective policy is to establish a regional quota on non‐feminized production combined with intertemporal cultivar spacing. This policy response will likely change across time and region as economic and network variables evolve.

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