Scott Swinton

• Michigan State University

Mounting evidence shows overall insect abundances are in decline globally. Habitat loss, climate change, and pesticides have all been implicated, but their relative effects have never been evaluated in a comprehensive large-scale study. We harmonized 17 years of land use, climate, multiple classes of pesticides, and butterfly survey data across 81...

Societal Impact Statement Morels (Morchella spp.) are specialty mushrooms that fetch high prices from wild‐foraged or indoor grown suppliers. Outdoor cultivation could expand availability and diversify morel crops. Participatory research trials in the United States during 2021–2023 resulted in low, uneven yields. Cost accounting reveals that in 202...

Mounting evidence shows insects are in decline globally. Habitat loss, climate change, and pesticides have all been implicated, but their relative effects have never been evaluated in a comprehensive large-scale study. We harmonized 17 years of land use, climate, multiple classes of pesticides and butterfly data across 60 counties in five states in...

Wild–foraged mushrooms represent a natural resource that provides economic value to foragers through both market and nonmarket recreational channels. Despite the importance of non–timber forest resources for sustainable management of forestlands, little attention has been paid to who forages for wild mushrooms, why they choose to forage, where they...

Resistant cultivars offer a pathway to sustainable intensification by maintaining yields and reducing inputs in the face of disease pressure. Past studies of economic returns to crop breeding research for disease resistance measured farm-level benefits, by comparing yields for improved resistant varieties (RVs) to susceptible traditional varieties....

Innovations in precision agriculture now enable the identification of crop field patches whose retirement offers high environmental benefits and the low opportunity cost of crop yield loss. Precision conservation can lower costs to farmers and payment costs for government agencies. Precision conservation incentive policy should unite elements of la...

Conservation tillage in American soybean production has become increasingly common, improving soil health while reducing soil erosion and fuel consumption. This trend has been reinforced by the widespread adoption of glyphosate‐based weed control systems. Many weed species have since evolved to resist glyphosate, reducing its effectiveness. We prov...

Freely downloadable at AgEcon Search: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/312079?ln=en&v=pdf

A Symposium on Economic and Environmental Implications of Biofuel

Biomass inventories and techno‐economic supply studies tend to overestimate economic supply of crop and timber residues, because they ignore human decisions on whether to permit residue removal. By combining information about biophysical availability, production and delivery costs, and the willingness of different types of decision maker to permit...

Soybean (Glycine max) sudden death syndrome (SDS), caused by F. virguliforme, is a key limitation in reaching soybean yield potential, stemming from incomplete disease management through cultural practices and partial host resistance. A fungicidal seed treatment was released in 2014 with the active ingredient fluopyram and was the first chemical ma...

Agricultural management recommendations based on short‐term studies can produce findings inconsistent with long‐term reality. Here, we test the long‐term environmental sustainability and profitability of continuous no‐till agriculture on yield, soil water availability, and N2O fluxes. Using a moving window approach, we investigate the development a...

Agricultural management recommendations based on short-term studies can produce findings inconsistent with long-term reality. Here, we test the long-term relative profitability and environmental sustainability of continuous no-till agriculture practices on crop yield, soil moisture, and N 2 O fluxes. Using a moving window approach, we investigate t...

Precision farming enables agricultural management decisions to be tailored spatially and temporally. Site-specific sensing, sampling, and managing allow farmers to treat a field as a heterogeneous entity. Through targeted use of inputs, precision farming reduces waste, thereby cutting both private variable costs and the environmental costs such as...

Among bioenergy feedstocks, timber and crop residues offer low marginal cost of production and low risk of indirect land use change that can boost greenhouse gas emissions. The potential economic supply depends on the willingness of producers to make residues available. Previous studies show that willingness to supply annual crop residues depends u...

Interventions in rural development projects vary in their likely time to impact. Some offer rapid payoffs after minimal learning and investment, while others offer larger payoffs but entail delays and may require learning or significant investment of labor and capital. Short-term impacts included reductions in stored grain losses due to improved si...

We find spatial dependence in landowners’ stated intentions to make land available for bioenergy crops. Our data are generated from a contingent valuation survey of 599 owners of marginal land in southern Michigan. Employing a Bayesian framework and using these spatially explicit data, we estimate and compare non-spatial probit and spatial Durbin p...

In an era of rising skepticism about science, this article explores what agricultural and applied economists can do to advance knowledge. If knowledge is what is believed by the preponderance of a community, then the key to advancing knowledge is to build substantive arguments-ones that are persuasive. To evaluate the substantiveness of an argument...

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...

Financial incentives are commonly used to promote voluntary adoption of agricultural best management practices (BMPs), but little is known about farmer preferences among alternative incentives. Using experimental procurement auctions, we evaluate how different conservation incentives affect farmer willingness to adopt BMPs that reduce phosphorus (P...

The promise of cellulose Cellulosic bioenergy, obtained from the lignocellulose that makes up nearly half of plant biomass, has considerable potential as an environmentally friendly energy source, but it still requires substantial resources to produce. Robertson et al. review the trade-offs between the use of cellulosic biofuels and climate mitigat...

Over the past century, U.S. field crop farmers have controlled weeds with progressively less costly technologies, moving from hoeing and draft cultivation to motorized cultivation to selective herbicides to broad-spectrum herbicides associated with herbicide-tolerant (HT) crops. The advent of herbicides had the effect of reducing both capital and l...

Runoff of agricultural nutrients and sediments has led to re-eutrophication of lakes and impaired stream health in the Great Lakes Basin since around 2000 following earlier success in protecting water quality. Substantial investment in conservation actions has had insufficient impact, due in part to a limited basis for understanding the likely envi...

In a world free of transaction costs, reverse auctions have the potential to cost-effectively allocate payment for environmental service contracts by targeting projects that provide the most benefit per dollar spent. However, auctions only succeed if enough farmers choose to bid so that the auctioneer can evaluate numerous projects for targeted fun...

Cost-effectively mitigating agricultural nutrient export requires an understanding of the biophysical characteristics of cropland as well as the behavioral and economic factors that drive land management decisions. Conservation auctions informed by models that simulate environmental outcomes have the potential to allocate conservation payments cost...

Despite the success of efforts to reduce phosphorus (P) pollution from point sources, P from non-point agricultural sources remains a vexing problem with many U.S. water bodies having impairments. Key to solving the P pollution puzzle is to take stock of progress to date, the puzzle pieces available, and the gaps to be filled. In this paper, we syn...

Land to produce biomass is essential if the United States is to expand bioenergy supply. Use of agriculturally marginal land avoids the food vs fuel problems of food price rises and carbon debt that are associated with crop and forest land. Recent remote sensing studies have identified large areas of U.S. marginal land deemed suitable for bioenergy...

This study elicits willingness to supply marginal land for biomass cultivation in Southern Lower Michigan. Most of the surveyed landowners are not interested in renting land for bioenergy crop production. Those who are interested offer relatively little land for bioenergy crops, even at rental rates three times current levels. Willing landowners wo...

Smallholder farmers in many areas of the semiarid tropics are planting exotic tree species that provide alternative income sources, fuel, and building materials. While providing other benefits, these trees often occupy land that could produce annual food crops. This study uses a polyperiod, linear programming model, to explore the opportunity cost...

Perennial, cellulosic bioenergy crops represent a risky investment. The potential for adoption of these crops depends not only on mean net returns, but also on the associated probability distributions and on the risk preferences of farmers. Using 6-year observed crop yield data from highly productive and marginally productive sites in the southern...

The integration of cover crops into cropping systems brings costs and benefits, both internal and external to the farm. Benefits include promoting pest-suppression, soil and water quality, nutrient cycling efficiency, and cash crop productivity. Costs of adopting cover crops include increased direct costs, potentially reduced income if cover crops...

Farmers hugely influence the mix of ecosystem services that rural landscapes provide. Their management choices about crop and livestock production practices affect services linked to water, soil, climate, and wild species. Apart from cropland and pastures, farmers also control woodlots, wetlands, and meadows that can keep groundwater clean, activel...

Row-crop agriculture is one of the most extensive and closely coupled natural-human systems and has extraordinary implications for human welfare and environmental well-being. The continued intensification of row-crop agriculture provides food for billions and, for at least the past 50 years, has slowed (but not stopped) the expansion of cropping on...

Using subregional models of crop production choices in central Wisconsin and southwest Michigan, we predict biomass production, land use, and environmental impacts with details that are unavailable from national scale models. When biomass prices are raised exogenously, we find that the subregional models overestimate the supply, the land use, and t...

Landowner perspectives can inform policy to encourage expansion of energy crop production onto non-crop, marginal land. This paper analyzes a survey of owners of non-crop marginal land in southern Michigan to classify landowners by their attitudes toward energy crop production. A factor analysis identifies common factors underlying their perception...

A balanced assessment of ecosystem services provided by agriculture requires a systems-level socioecological understanding of related management practices at local to landscape scales. The results from 25 years of observation and experimentation at the Kellogg Biological Station long-term ecological research site reveal services that could be provi...

Producing bioenergy feedstocks on non-crop land can largely avoid the food price feedbacks of energy biomass production on cropland. The U.S. northern tier grassland-to-forest ecotone offers large areas of marginal land that is not currently cropped. In this ecological transition zone, the relative profitability of grassy vs. woody sources of energ...

Agriculture is the world’s largest managed ecosystem. It provides food, fiber, and biofuel to consumers, while sustaining livelihoods of farmers. It also offers a host of other natural benefits, known as ecosystem services. Apart from the services that meet human needs for food, fiber, and biofuel, these other services include maintaining balance i...

This paper evaluates environmental policy effects on ligno-cellulosic biomass production and environmental outcomes using an integrated bioeconomic optimization model. The environmental policy integrated climate (EPIC) model is used to simulate crop yields and environmental indicators in current and future potential bioenergy cropping systems based...

This paper compares environmental and profitability outcomes for a centralized biorefinery for cellulosic ethanol that does all processing versus a biorefinery linked to a decentralized array of local depots that pretreat biomass into concentrated briquettes. The analysis uses a spatial bioeconomic model that maximizes profit from crop and energy p...

Understanding farmers’ willingness to participate in agricultural payment‐for‐environmental‐services (PES) programmes is an essential precondition for designing effective and efficient programmes. Willingness to participate is typically examined via stated preference surveys using the standard hurdle model for whether and how much to participate. A...

By suppressing pest populations, natural enemies provide an important ecosystem service that maintains the stability of agricultural ecosystems systems and potentially mitigates producers' pest control costs. Integrating natural control services into decisions about pesticide-based control has the potential to significantly improve the economic eff...

Farmland provides agricultural products and natural amenities, as well as residential sites. The emergence of exurbanization appears to be changing the demand for natural amenities and their role in determining land values. To better understand how appraised value and sale price capture the determinants of farmland value in a region facing exurbani...

When evaluating the impact of a program, the effects of interventions on program outcomes must be measured against a valid counterfactual case. Constructing a valid counterfactual is especially important when experimental data is not available. Building a baseline ensuring that treatment and comparison groups are similar as well as identifying pote...

This paper introduces a spatially-explicit bioeconomic model for the study of potential cellulosic biomass supply. For biomass crops to begin to replace current crops, farmers must earn more from them than from current crops. Using weather, topographic and soil data, the terrestrial ecosystem model, EPIC, dynamically simulates multiple cropping sys...

The global reach of human activities affects all natural ecosystems, so that the environment is best viewed as a socia—ecological system. Consequently, a more integrative approach to environmental science, one that bridges the biophysical and social domains, is sorely needed. Although models and frameworks for social—ecological systems exist, few a...

We study a farmer’s decision to convert traditional cropland into land for growing dedicated energy crops, taking into account sunk conversion costs and uncertainties in crop returns. The optimal decision rules differ significantly from the expected net present value rule, which ignores uncertainties, and from real options models that allow only on...

Agricultural lands, primarily managed for crops and livestock production, provide various ecosystem services (ES) to people. In theory, the economic value of the service flows that can be captured privately is capitalized into land prices. This study proposes an integrative framework to characterize the ecosystem services associated with agricultur...

By expanding energy biomass production on marginal lands that are not currently used for crops, food prices increase and indirect climate change effects can be mitigated. Studies of the availability of marginal lands for dedicated bioenergy crops have focused on biophysical land traits, ignoring the human role in decisions to convert marginal land...

The public demand for ecosystem services measured by willingness to pay (WTP) in contingent valuation studies provides important information for designing Payment-for-Ecosystem-Service (PES) programs. However, the hypothetical markets for contingent valuation and respondents’ unfamiliarity with certain ecosystem services may increase their preferen...

The global reach of human activities affects all natural ecosystems, so that the environment is best viewed as a social–ecological system. Consequently, a more integrative approach to environmental science, one that bridges the biophysical and social domains, is sorely needed. Although models and frameworks for social–ecological systems exist, few...

By their direct effects on private profitability, invasive agricultural pests create special incentives for management that set them apart from other categories of invasive species. One attractive nonchemical management approach for agricultural pests relies upon biological control by natural enemies. By improving the habitat of natural enemies of...

In response to growing consumer concerns, developed-country governments have reduced permissible pesticide residue levels in food. Many food retailers have developed even more stringent private food safety protocols relating to pesticide use, storage and disposal and passed them on to their suppliers. Exporters in developing countries enforce these...

In Europe and North America, long-term ecological research (LTER) networks are changing their treatment of human activity from exogenous ‘disturbances’ to endogenous behaviour. The engagement of social scientists in LTER networks currently takes forms ranging from nonexistent, to research in parallel with ecological research but with minimal intera...

The expected profitability of six cellulosic feedstock crops is compared with two corn (Zea mays L.)-based systems under southern Great Lakes region conditions over a projected 10-yr period. At 2006-2009 costs and yields from literature, none would be more profitable than the corn-based systems. Comparative breakeven price analysis identifies the c...

This paper adopts a real options framework to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of four types of subsidies that aim to encourage a socially desirable land use under return uncertainties and costly reversibility of land use change. We first present a land conversion model to show how the subsidies that are expected net present value (ENPV) equivalent...

This paper introduces a spatial bioeconomic model for study of potential cellulosic biomass supply at regional scale. By modeling the profitability of alternative crop production practices, it captures the opportunity cost of replacing current crops by cellulosic biomass crops. The model draws upon biophysical crop input-output coefficients, price...

Advanced biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol are of great interest in the USA. With agriculture being the major source of feedstock for advanced biofuels, how farmers would respond to markets and policy incentives in providing such feedstock can directly affect sufficient and sustainable supply of advanced biofuels and their environmental sustainab...

Soybean aphid, Aphis glycines Matsumura (Hemiptera: Aphididae), is one of the most damaging pests of soybean, Glycine max (L.) Merrill, in the midwestern United States and Canada. We compared three soybean aphid management techniques in three midwestern states (Iowa, Michigan, and Minnesota) for a 3-yr period (2005-2007). Management techniques incl...

Soybean aphid, Aphis glycines Matsumura, is a major invasive pest that has caused substantial yield loss and increased insecticide use in the United States since its discovery in 2000. Using the economic surplus approach, we estimate the economic benefits of U.S. research and outreach for integrated pest management (IPM) of soybean aphid. We calcul...

The purpose of this chapter is to describe steps that can be followed to assess economic impacts of IPM. These steps are well established for evaluating user and society level profitability. The protocol is less agreed upon for evaluating the economic value of health and environmental impacts, but this chapter highlights steps in applying a non-mar...

Weed management decision aids have proliferated in recent years, but none of them have been rigorously compared with actual farmer weed management on farm fields. This research comC, pares the Michigan WEEDSIM/GWM bioeconomic model and the CORNHERB and SOYHERB herbicide selection models with farmer weed management in Michigan. In 19 site-years of r...

Nascent research on the profitability of site-specific weed management has focused on reduced herbicide use, ignoring significant information costs for scouting, making treatment maps, and patch herbicide application. Including these information costs results in few, if any, studies, fully covering added costs with herbicide savings. Real-time, sen...

The control of pests by their natural enemies represents an important regulating ecosystem service that helps maintain the stability of crop ecosystems. These services, however, are often ignored in pest management decision making. In addition, the use of broad-spectrum insecticides can damage the populations of natural enemies, reducing the cost-e...

Increased demand for corn grain as an ethanol feedstock is altering U.S. agricultural landscapes and the ecosystem services they provide. From 2006 to 2007, corn acreage increased 19% nationally, resulting in reduced crop diversity in many areas. Biological control of insects is an ecosystem service that is strongly influenced by local landscape st...

publication series for research on Agricultural Research issues. Publications under the Research Summary series are short (3- 4 pages), carefully focused reports designated to provide timely research results on issues of great interest. Publications under the Research Paper series are designed to provide longer, more in depth treatment of agricultu...

Institute of Agricultural Research of Mozambique Directorate of Training, Documentation, and Technology Transfer

Economic impact analyses of IPM programs measure the economic effects on producers and consumers that can be attributed to IPM programs and practices. Good impact assessments are tailored to the objectives of the programs they are evaluating. Because IPM program objectives and approaches can vary widely, there is no one-size-fits-all method for IPM...

Advanced biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol are of great interest for their potential to supply a significant portion of U.S. fuel needs plus advantages over corn grain-based ethanol. The sustainability of agriculture-based advanced biofuels depends on how farmers would respond in providing biomass feedstock, yet economic behavior by farmers has b...

Summary Using a recursive optimization model, we analyze how the incorporation of charcoal production by pioneer farmers in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest would affect household net returns and the rate of deforestation at the early stage of forest colonization. Because charcoal production diverts scarce dry-season labor from land clearing for agri...

Agricultural ecosystems are actively managed by humans to optimize the provision of food, fiber, and fuel. These ecosystem services from agriculture, classified as provisioning services by the recent Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, depend in turn upon a web of supporting and regulating services as inputs to production (e.g., soil fertility and pol...

Crop and rangelands are over 25% of the Earth's land area, and they are expanding. Agricultural ecosystems rely on a suite of supporting ecosystem services to provide food, fiber and fuel as well as a range of accompanying but non-marketed ecosystem services (ES). Ecosystem services from agriculture include regulation of water and climate systems,...

IntroductionSpatial technologies for weed managementSpatial technologies for management of nematodes, insects and plant diseasesEnvironmental assessment of sitespecific pest managementPrognosis for adoption of SSPM and pesticide reductionAcknowledgement

European food safety standards have increased the fixed and transactions costs of Kenyan green bean farmers while requiring more stringent quality monitoring by exporting firms. This paired case study finds that large farms use owner equity to invest in improved facilities. Small farms attain scale economies by joining a marketing group that spread...

This study explores how human capital affects farm household earnings using two tools to refine measurement of human capital effects. First, it employs a two-sector model to allow the allocation of family labor between farm and nonfarm activities. Second, it accounts for village fixed effects to evaluate whether results from panel data differ meani...

The control of crop pests by their natural enemies represents an important ecosystem service that maintains the stability of agricultural systems and has the potential to mitigate pest control costs. Recently, there has been growing interest in enhancing natural control services via habitat management that provides resources for adult natural enemi...

We live in unprecedented times. The global human population, which may reach 10 billion by 2050, is making increasing demands on natural resources, resulting in rapid, extensive, and pervasive changes in Earth’s systems (Fig.1, 1, 2, 3, 4). Many of these changes are also presenting unprecedented challenges to our understanding of how the biosphere...

This study examines the profitability and stability of site-specific (SS) nitrogen fertilizer recommendations using an empirical model of SS yield response to controlled inputs, stable site characteristics, and time-varying weather factors. Using a three-year panel of on-farm corn yield experiments and new, continuous variables to describe site cha...