Filtering by
- Creators: Arizona State University
This dissertation considers three aspects of the problem:
1. the relationship between changes in land cover due to CRP enrollment and changes in water quality, controlling for a range of factors known to have an effect on the filtering role of different land covers;
2. the inter-annual variability in water quality measures and enrollment in different CRP conservation practices to examine the cost-effectiveness of specific conservation practices in mitigating lake sedimentation and eutrophication;
3. discrete choice models to identify what characteristics drive the enrollment by farmers into specific conservation practices.
Results indicate that land cover and CRP have different impacts on different indicators of lake water quality. In addition, conservation practices that were cost-effective for one water quality variable tended to be cost-effective for the other water quality variables. Farmers are making decisions to enroll in CRP based on the opportunity cost of the land. Therefore, it is necessary to alter financial incentives to promote productive land being putting into CRP through continuous sign-up. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) needs a more effective way to calculate the payment level for practices in order to be competitive with the predicted value of major crops.
This research develops planning tools tailored to the production/consolidation level in the supply chain, taking the perspective of an agricultural cooperative—a business model which presents unique coordination challenges. These institutions are prone to internal conflict brought about by strategic behavior, internal competition and the distributed nature of production information, which members keep private.
A mechanism is designed to coordinate agricultural production in a distributed manner with asymmetrically distributed information. Coordination is achieved by varying the prices of goods in an auction like format and allowing participants to choose their supply quantities; the auction terminates when production commitments match desired supply.
In order to prevent participants from misrepresenting their information, strategic bidding is formulated from the farmer’s perspective as an optimization problem; thereafter, optimal bidding strategies are formulated to refine the structure of the coordination mechanism in order to minimize the negative impact of strategic bidding. The coordination mechanism is shown to be robust against strategic behavior and to provide solutions with a small optimality gap. Additional information and managerial insights are obtained from bidding data collected throughout the mechanism. It is shown that, through hierarchical clustering, farmers can be effectively classified according to their cost structures.
Finally, considerations of stochastic yields as they pertain to coordination are addressed. Here, the farmer’s decision of how much to plant in order to meet contracted supply is modeled as a newsvendor with stochastic yields; furthermore, options contracts are made available to the farmer as tools for enhancing coordination. It is shown that the use of option contracts reduces the gap between expected harvest quantities and the contracted supply, thus facilitating coordination.
The Kilombero Valley lies at the intersection of a network of protected areas that cross Tanzania. The wetlands and woodlands of the Valley, as well as the forest of surrounding mountains are abundant in biodiversity and are considered to be critical areas for conservation. This area, however, is also the home to more than a half million people, primarily poor smallholder farmers. In an effort to support the livelihoods and food security of these farmers and the larger Tanzanian population, the country has recently targeted a series of programs to increase agricultural production in the Kilombero Valley and elsewhere in the country. Bridging concepts and methods from land change science, political ecology, and sustainable livelihoods, I present an integrated assessment of the linkages between development and conservation efforts in the Kilombero Valley and the implications for food security.
This dissertation uses three empirical studies to understand the process of development in the Kilombero Valley and to link the priorities and perceptions of conservation and development efforts to the material outcomes in food security and land change. The first paper of this dissertation examines the changes in land use in the Kilombero Valley between 1997 and 2014 following the privatization of agriculture and the expansion of Tanzania’s Kilimo Kwanza program. Remote sensing analysis reveals a two-fold increase in agricultural area during this short time, largely at the expense of forest. Protected areas in some parts of the Valley appear to be deterring deforestation, but rapid agricultural growth, particularly surrounding a commercial rice plantation, has led to loss of extant forest and sustained habitat fragmentation. The second paper focuses examines livelihood strategies in the Valley and claims regarding the role of agrobiodiversity in food security.
The results of household survey reveal no difference or lower food security among households that diversify their agricultural activities. Some evidence, however, emerges regarding the importance of home gardens and crop diversification for dietary diversity. The third paper considers the competing discourses surrounding conservation and development in the Kilombero Valley. Employing q-method, this paper discerns four key viewpoints among various stakeholders in the Valley. While there are some apparently intractable distinctions between among these discourses, consensus regarding the importance of wildlife corridors and the presence of boundary-crossing individuals provide the promise of collaboration and compromise.
During the postwar period, Tempe became part of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Agricultural production in Tempe yielded to suburban development, as a producer-oriented landscape of farms and ranches became a consumer-oriented landscape of residential subdivisions and university buildings. Intangible goods such as higher education eclipsed tangible goods such as grain, dairy, and cotton. Single-family houses supplanted farmland; shopping centers with parking lots undermined main street businesses; irrigation water became domestic water; and International-style university buildings displaced vernacular neighborhoods rooted in the early history of the settlement. In Tempe, the rural agricultural landscape gave way to a suburban landscape. But in important ways, the former shaped the latter, as the suburban metropolis inherited the underlying form and spatial relationships of farms and ranches.