The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen an upsurge in petroleum prices and an increased concern over greenhouse gas emissions. Consequently, the interest in biodiesel production has heightened. Policy at the Federal level, such as the blender’s tax credit which provides $1 for every gallon of biodiesel blended with...
A cost function characterizes a firm's cost-minimizing behavior. It is defined
as a function of the level of outputs produced and the prices of factors which enter
the production process. Econometric estimation of a cost function allows one to test
hypotheses regarding the structure of cost and the structure of...
The impact of recent severe droughts throughout the United States, the potential for climate change to intensify the frequency and severity of drought, and discussion about the future of government assistance in agriculture highlight the need for a transition from drought as ‘disaster’ to drought as ‘managed risk’. However, guidance...
This dissertation consists of three papers on agricultural nonpoint source pollution and control. The first paper focuses primarily on agricultural land use changes under alternative conservation policies. The second and third papers address environmental implications of these policies and their cost effectiveness. In the first paper, the effect of alternative...
Water temperature is an important measure of water quality, as well as a dominant factor affecting aquatic life within the stream environment. Elevated water temperatures can decrease the survival rate of fish in each life stage. Cold water species, such as salmonids, are particularly susceptible to elevated water temperatures. For...
Pre-harvest sprouting in wheat costs farmers millions of dollars every year. Pre-harvest sprouting tolerance (PST) has minimized this problem, but improvement of PST is still necessary. Synthetic hexaploid wheats (synthetics) have been used as sources of
genes coding for many useful traits. Two studies evaluated the PST of a synthetic...
This study develops an improved method for understanding
economic production relationships in small scale
fisheries. This method postulates that gross revenue is a
function of physical input quantities, and is based upon
the transcendental logarithmic function to derive factor
share equations for each of the five inputs in the model....
In this work, we first introduce a novel approach to the long term irrigation scheduling
using Genetic Algorithms (GAs). We explore the effectiveness of GAs in the context of
optimizing nonlinear crop models and describe application requirements and implementation of
the technique. GAs were found to converge quickly to near-optimal...
Alternative futures studies provide a way for policy-makers and stakeholders to investigate the future impacts of different management strategies by providing representations of possible outcomes. An alternative futures study was undertaken by the Pacific Northwest-Ecosystem Research Consortium for the Willamette River Basin, Oregon, USA, to determine how this regional system...