Madhu Khanna

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics

Low carbon fuel policies such as the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), Canada Clean Fuel Regulations (CFR), and California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) are intended to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transportation. Cellulosic feedstocks, optimized biorefineries, and favorable farming locations can significantly reduce biofuel c...

The heavy reliance on herbicides for weed control has led to an increase in resistant weeds in the United States. Robotic weed control is emerging as an alternative technology for removing weeds mechanically using artificial intelligence. We develop an integrated weed ecological and economic dynamic (I-WEED) model to examine the biophysical and eco...

Agrivoltaics (AV), the integration of agriculture and photovoltaic (PV) technology, can provide solutions to address land use conflicts associated with growing demands for food, energy, and water resources. Currently, there is no method to address the site-specific characteristics of AV (altered microclimate, crop yield, PV and crop design) in a pl...

Societal Impact Statement Transformative agricultural strategies like agrivoltaics (AV) are essential for addressing the pressing global issues of sustainable energy and food production in a changing climate. Conservation‐agrivoltaics (Conservation‐AV) provides the potential to meet these needs while reinforcing natural resources and protecting the...

The slowing of agricultural productivity growth globally over the past two decades has brought a new urgency to detect its drivers and potential solutions. We show that air pollution, particularly surface ozone (O3), is strongly associated with declining agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) in China. We employ machine learning algorithms to...

Cellulosic biofuels from non-food feedstocks, while appealing, continue to encounter uncertainty about their induced land use change (ILUC) effects, net greenhouse gas (GHG) saving potential and their economic costs. We analyse the implications of multiple uncertainties along the biofuel supply chain from feedstock yields, land availability for pro...

Biodiesel production has been growing in the United States and although its amount is small by comparison with corn ethanol, its addition to existing demands on land can have nonlinear effects on land use, due to an upward sloping and increasingly inelastic supply of land. It is critical to quantify these effects to inform future policies that may...

Perennial bioenergy crops provide substantial carbon mitigation benefits but have risky returns. We couple economic analysis with a biogeochemical model (DayCent) to examine the effect of carbon mitigation payments on the spatially varying bioenergy crop returns and risk profiles relative to conventional crops across the rainfed United States. Thes...

Cellulosic biofuels are part of a portfolio of solutions to address climate change; however, their production remains expensive and federal policy interventions (e.g., Renewable Fuel Standard) have not spurred broad construction of cellulosic biorefineries. A range of state-level interventions have also been enacted, but their implications for the...

This study estimates the distributional heterogeneity in the effects of climate change on yields of three major cereal crops: rice, maize, and wheat in India using district‐level information for the period 1966–2015. We distinguish between the effects of changes in growing season weather from those due to changes in long‐term climate trends and the...

Determining optimal management practices for the profitable production of perennial energy crops is critical for scaling up production beyond experimental levels. Though many experimental field studies have examined the effects of management practices on the performance of miscanthus and switchgrass, there are no recommendations for economically op...

Plain Language Summary Cover crops typically grow after cash crop harvesting and before the following season's planting of cash crops, and can bring benefits to agricultural sustainability. To stimulate cover crop adoption in the U.S. Midwest, the U.S. government has made significant financial and technical support to farmers for cover cropping (e....

The emergence of the cellulosic bioeconomy requires not only adequate technological, economic, and policy advances, but also effective communication and coordination among the multiple stakeholders in the bioeconomy community. Aiming to facilitate stakeholder communication and collaboration for cellulosic bioeconomy growth, an agent-based model is...

Obligated parties have chosen to comply with the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) by increasing the blending of biomass‐based biodiesel beyond originally targeted levels rather than increasing blending/consumption of ethanol to targeted levels that would have required pricing higher blends of ethanol (E85) at or below an energy‐equivalent level to E10...

Cover crops have critical significance for agroecosystem sustainability and have been long promoted in the U.S. Midwest. Knowledge of the variations of cover cropping and the impacts of government policies remains very limited. We developed an accurate and cost-effective approach utilizing multi-source satellite fusion data, environmental variables...

Unconventional energy extraction has been accompanied by a faster increase in aggregate wastewater generation compared with conventional practice. Understanding the extent to which it is due to technologies, energy production, or geological characteristics has implications for reducing the associated environmental risks. We analyze how wastewater g...

Agriculture faces key challenges of increasing productivity while reducing adverse impacts on the environment. Conventional practices that rely on tillage, inefficient and over‐application of chemicals, and monoculture row cropping are leading to growing resistance of weeds and pests to chemicals, nutrient and sediment run‐off, and declining soil c...

Optimal management of the perennial bioenergy crops, miscanthus and switchgrass, requires an understanding of their responsiveness to nitrogen (N) fertilizer at different maturity stages across locations and growing conditions. Earlier studies that have examined the yield response of these crops to N and stand age using field experiments or meta‐an...

Complex societal challenges call for solutions that require innovative thinking and new ways of problem‐solving that creatively combine knowledge from multiple disciplines. It is imperative that applied economists engage in interdisciplinary research and apply systems thinking and analytical approaches to analyzing trade‐offs and behavioral drivers...

Agriculture contributes nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which is motivating interest in certain farming practices that have the potential to reduce GHG emissions or sequester carbon in soil. The related GHG emission (including N2O and CH4) and changes in soil carbon stock are defined here as “agricultural carbon outcomes”...

The success of a bioenergy policy relies largely on the wide adoption of perennial energy crops at the farm-scale. This study uses survey data to examine potential adoption decisions by farmers in the US Midwest and the causal effects of various direct and indirect influencing factors, especially heterogeneous preferences of farmers. A Bayesian net...

Emerging advances in sustainable intensification technologies have the potential to transform land use and crop management approaches in ways that can increase resource productivity and reduce adverse environmental impacts of agricultural production. This paper describes emerging technologies that can sustainably intensify food and renewable energy...

The 2018 Farm Bill lowered the maximum rental payments for the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) by 10%–15% and increased the acreage enrollment cap by 3 million acres. We show that CRP acreage will decrease by 1.18 million acres (associated with a 3.3% environmental benefit decrease of the CRP) as a result of the rental rate reduction and that CR...

Marginal land has received wide attention for its potential to produce bioenergy feedstocks while minimizing diversion of productive agricultural land from food crop production. However, there has been no consensus in the literature on how to define or identify land that is marginal for food crops and beneficial for bioenergy crops. Studies have us...

We quantify long-run adaptation of U.S. corn and soybean yields to changes in temperature and precipitation over 1951–2017. Results show that although the two crops became more heat- and drought-tolerant, their productivity under normal temperature and precipitation conditions decreased. Over 1951–2017, heat- and drought-tolerance increased corn an...

Climate change is a major environmental challenge that is likely to affect many aspects of life in Illinois, ranging from human and environmental health to the economy. Illinois is already experiencing impacts from the changing climate and, as climate change progresses and temperatures continue to rise, these impacts are expected to increase over t...

Mandates, like the renewable fuel standard (RFS), for biofuels from corn and cellulosic feedstocks, impact the environment in multiple ways by affecting land use, nitrogen (N)-leakage, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We analyze the differing trade-offs these different types of biofuels offer among these multi-dimensional environmental effects a...

A firm’s capability to innovate is influenced by its organizational structure. We examine the effect of Total Quality Environmental Management (TQEM) on the adoption of innovative pollution prevention activities over the period 1992–1996, and show that the rate of innovation increases following the adoption of TQEM. However, the effect of TQEM on p...

The Clean Power Plan (CPP) was repealed due to concerns about the “unnecessary, costly burdens” it may impose on electric utilities, thereby delaying efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) from the electricity sector. This paper examines the greenhouse gas and welfare implications of this repeal while incorporating the presence of the sta...

Demand for biofuel production driven by the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) has coincided with increased land in corn production and increasing nitrogen (N) loss to the Gulf of Mexico. Diversifying cropland with perennial energy crops (miscanthus and switchgrass) may reduce N loss and improve water quality. However, the extent of these benefits depe...

Using land already enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in the eastern region of the U.S. for producing energy crops for bioenergy while reducing land rental payments offers the potential for lowering the program costs, increasing returns to CRP landowners, and displacing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuels. We develop an...

A recent study by DeCicco et al. (Climatic Change 138:667–680, 2016) claims that corn used for ethanol should not be considered to be inherently biogenically carbon-neutral because not all that corn was grown additional to the level otherwise. By assessing the extent of carbon neutrality of corn for ethanol using the reference point baseline approa...

Neonicotinoid insecticides are being widely used and have raised concerns about negative impacts on non-target organisms. However, there has been no large-scale, generalizable study on their impact on biodiversity of avian species in the United States. Here we show, using a rich dataset on breeding birds and pesticide use in the United States, that...

The digital transformation of agriculture is enabling the collection of vast amounts of geo‐referenced information about growing conditions within the field and facilitating the automated implementation of spatially varying input applications. This has the potential to increase production efficiency, reduce overapplication of inputs, lower input wa...

COVID‐19 has led to an unprecedented reduction in demand for energy for transportation and electricity, a crash in prices and employment in the fossil fuel industries and record‐breaking reductions in global carbon emissions. This paper discusses whether this “demand destruction” could spell the beginning of the end for fossil fuels or a temporary...

The Companies Act went into effect in India on April 1, 2014 making it the first law in the world to mandate that companies spend 2% of their profits on corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. We use panel data for 39,736 firms with a difference-in-difference model to estimate the average treatment effect of the Act on firms ‘eligible’ f...

This paper analyzes the effects of community pressure on the relocation of toxic-releasing facilities by using the public disclosure of toxic release information through the Toxic Release Inventory as a natural experiment. We find that facilities are more likely to relocate from communities with high population density, income, and educational atta...

The food-energy-water (FEW) nexus is facing grand challenges in meeting increasing demand resulting from global changes in climate, economy, and population. Emerging technologies are expected to play a critical role in responding to these challenges. Focusing on four types of prominent emerging technologies (namely precision agriculture coupled wit...

Low carbon alternatives are an imperative for decarbonizing the transportation sector. There is growing interest in electrification of transportation but even with aggressive growth in sales, a significant share of transportation is expected to rely on liquid fuel by midcentury. Biofuels are appealing as low carbon fuels but those produced from foo...

This paper examines the marginal effects of temperature on the growth rate and variability in growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP) of a country, as measured by its production efficiency relative to a stochastic frontier. Using panel data for 168 countries for the period 1950–2014 to estimate a one-step stochastic frontier function, we fin...

Precision farming enabled by big data and gene-editing technologies are accelerating progress toward increasing nitrogen-use efficiency. However, farmer engagement, public–private partnerships and sound public policies are critical to harness the potential of such technologies to reduce hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico.

We apply prospect theory to examining farmers’ economic incentives to divert a share of their land to bioenergy crops (miscanthus and switchgrass in this study). Numerical simulation is conducted for 1,919 rain‐fed U.S. counties to identify the impact of loss aversion on bioenergy crop adoption and how this impact is influenced by biomass price, di...

Expansion of ethanol production in the United States has raised concerns regarding its land-use change effects. However, little is known about the extent to which observed land use change in the United States can be attributed to ethanol plant proximity or is caused by changes in crop prices that may be partly induced by expansion in ethanol produc...

In the US, renewable energy policy has largely followed a regional approach; 29 states are currently implementing Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs) at varying levels of stringency, while the other states have no renewable energy policy. Requiring individual states to achieve given targets is likely to be less efficient and lead to different leve...

The increase in corn ethanol production has raised concerns about its indirect impacts on the expansion of cropland and implications for the environment and continues to be a controversial issue. In particular, land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) declined by 7.2 million acres between 2007 and 2012 while corn ethanol production m...

The corporate social responsibility rules, which came into force from April 2014, make it mandatory for large Indian firms to set aside at least 2% of their average net profit for socially responsible expenditures. This paper aims to provide an assessment of the response by firms to these rules. It examines the extent to which these rules have led...

U.S. agriculture is vital to meeting a growing global population's demand for food, fiber, feed, and fuel. Smart technologies, big data, and improvements in crop genetics present producers with promising new opportunities for meeting these needs. However, a changing climate and an expanding global population impose challenges to increasing crop and...

There is heated debate about the best way to realize the potential of our forests in the fight against climate change. In the EU, the debate is currently very much focused on questioning the use of forest biomass to produce bioenergy. Our view is that bioenergy from sustainably managed forests can contribute positively to climate change mitigation.

This paper examines the optimal choice among conventional gasoline vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), plug-in HEVs (PHEV), and full-battery EVs taking into account the differing characteristics of these vehicles, such as cost, emissions per mile, and vehicle miles to be traveled between refueling and acceleration time. The existing challeng...

The carbon benefits from forest bioenergy have been controversial with some environmental groups and scientists considering it to be even worse than coal while others contend that its use can lead to substantial savings in emissions relative to coal. Studies assessing the GHG implications of forest bioenergy differ in the source of emissions (bioge...

Energy policies for greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation in the United States have set sectorspecific standards, such as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) for the transportation and the electricity sectors, respectively. This paper examines the welfare costs and effectiveness of GHG abatement with these policie...

Efforts to reduce the indirect land use change (ILUC) -related carbon emissions caused by biofuels has led to inclusion of an ILUC factor as a part of the carbon intensity of biofuels in a Low Carbon Fuel Standard. While previous research has provided varying estimates of this ILUC factor, there has been no research examining the economic effects a...

The literature on technology adoption provides key insights that can explain the incentives and barriers to the adoption of new energy crops for producing biofuels to displace fossil fuels. Energy crops are perennials with high upfront costs and establishment lags. They also differ from conventional crops in their riskiness. Their production involv...

Agriculture, while one of the oldest industries, has had a high rate of technological change during much of the twentieth century. Every few decades a new sector is added to agriculture and affects the rest of the agricultural sector, primarily by adding a competing demand for land and affecting the prices of crops. The biofuel sector was introduce...

Biofuel production expanded dramatically in the US and Brazil in the last decade but has begun to plateau. The accompanying increase in prices of food crops and its potential to lead to land use changes has led to skepticism about the greenhouse gas mitigation potential of biofuels. Chapters in this book discuss the policy and market drivers for bi...

Biofuel production in Brazil has been motivated by a desire to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and encourage rural economic development. Policies and technologies over the past 25 years have lowered production costs and created profitable opportunities. The industry grew through political willingness to support an infant industry, continuous tech...

This paper examines the changes in land use in the U.S. likely to be induced by biofuel and climate policies and the implications of these policies for GHG emissions over the 2007–2030 period. The policies considered here include a modified Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) by itself as well as combined with a cellulosic biofuel tax credit, a carbon pr...

To accommodate rapid technological change in agriculture, contract farming has emerged as a market response to manage and share risks along the supply chain. Contract farming strengthens vertical coordination for producers and processors motivated by desire to decrease randomness, overcome credit and risk constraints, assure production targets, and...

Perennial energy crops are a promising source of bioenergy whose production involves production risks, long-term commitment of land and need for crop-specific investments without the coverage of crop insurance potentially available for conventional crops. We conduct a choice experiment in five states in the Midwestern and South-central regions of t...

We develop an analytical framework to examine the extent to which farmers' risk and time preferences, availability of credit to cover establishment cost, and subsidized crop insurance for conventional crops influence the decision to allocate land to a perennial energy crop and affect the costs of meeting a biofuel mandate using this crop as feedsto...

Renewable energy policies in the electricity and transportation sectors in the United States are expected to create demand for biomass and food crops (corn) that could divert land from food crop production. We develop a dynamic, open-economy, price-endogenous multi-market model of the US agricultural, electricity and transportation sectors to endog...

The Environmental Protection Agency has encouraged voluntary efforts at pollution prevention by facilities through participation in environmental programs like the 33/50 program to reduce toxic releases. This paper examines the effectiveness of the 33/50 program in adoption of pollution prevention practices and disentangle the effect of adoption fr...

In its second volume, this book aims to link the academic research with development in the real world and provide a historical and institutional background that can enrich more formal research. The first section will include an assessment of the evolution and the state of the nascent second-generation biofuel as well as a perspective on the evoluti...

Carbon markets would encourage forest landowners to increase rotation ages of their plantations. Emerging wood-based energy markets would increase prices of small-diameter timber products, thereby encouraging forest landowners to possibly opt for shorter rotation ages. We developed a comprehensive forest carbon model to track four carbon pools (car...

Sustainable transportation biofuels may require considerable changes in land use to meet mandated targets. Understanding the possible impact of different policies on land use and greenhouse gas emissions has typically proceeded by exploring either ecosystem or economic modelling. Here we integrate such models to assess the potential for the US Rene...

Long-term contracts are likely to be critical to induce the production of perennial energy crops as a feedstock for the emerging cellulosic biofuel industry. This paper develops a framework to analyze the determinants of landowner choice among a land-leasing contract, a fixed-price contract, and a revenue-sharing contract for energy crop production...

Brazil has pursued a mix of policy interventions in the fuel sector to achieve multiple objectives of economic and social development, promoting biofuels and reducing dependence on oil. We develop an economic framework to provide insight on the fuel policy choices in Brazil and to analyze the trade-offs they have engendered in the fuel and sugar se...

Exports of pellets from the United States (US) are growing significantly to meet the demand for renewable energy in the European Union. This transatlantic trade in pellets has raised questions about the greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity of these pellets and their effects on conventional forest product markets in the US. This paper examines the GHG int...

Implementing public policies often involves navigating an array of choices that have economic and environmental consequences that are difficult to quantify given the complexity of multiple system interactions. Implementing the mandate for cellulosic biofuel production in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), and reducing hypoxia in the northern Gulf o...

Biofuel mandates are being widely used by countries to achieve multiple objectives of energy security and climate change mitigation. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) in the US specifies arbitrarily chosen volumetric targets for different types of biofuels in the US based on their greenhouse gas intensity only. Cellulosic biofuels from high yieldin...