The Effect Of Farmland Preservation Programs On Farmland Prices

Government agencies in urbanizing areas are increasingly utilizing purchase and transfer of development rights programs to preserve farmland and protect local farm economies. This article tests the effect of development restrictions imposed by permanent easement sales on farmland sales prices, using Maryland data. We correct for selectivity bias due to the voluntary nature of these programs in estimating hedonic sales equations. Although preserved parcels' actual land values are lower, the effect of the restrictions is not statistically significant. These findings may encourage additional participation in preservation programs or justify reductions in the easement prices paid by agencies.

Farmers, who own or rent most of the private land in America, hold the key not only to the nation's food supply, but also to managing community growth, maintaining an attractive landscape, and protecting water and wildlife resources. While the issue of protecting farmland and open space is not new, the intensity of the challenge has increased. Farmers are harder pressed to make a living, and rural and suburban communities are struggling to accommodate increasing populations and the development that comes with them. Holding Our Ground can help landowners and communities devise and implement effective strategies for protecting farmland. The book: discusses the reasons for protecting farmland and how to make those reasons widely known and understood describes the business of farming, federal government farm programs, and the role of land in farmers's decisions analyzes federal, state, and local farmland protection efforts and techniques explores a variety of land protection options including purchase of development rights; transfer of development rights; private land trusts; and financial, tax, and estate planning reviews the strengths and weaknesses of the farmland protection tools available The authors describe the many challenges involved in protecting farmland and explain how to create a package of techniques that can meet those challenges. In addition, they offer appendixes with model zoning ordinances, nuisance disclaimers, conservation easements, and other documents that individuals and communities need to carry out the programs discussed. Holding Our Ground provides citizens, elected officials, planners, and landowners with a solid basis for understanding the issues behind farmland protection, and will be an invaluable resource in developing techniques and programs for achieving long-term protection goals.

As external forces increase the demand for land conversion, communities are increasingly open to policies that encourage conservation of farm and forest lands. This interest in conservation notwithstanding, the consequences of land-use policy and the drivers of land conversions are often unclear. One of the first books to deal exclusively with the economics of rural-urban sprawl, Economics and Contemporary Land-Use Policy explores the causes and consequences of rapidly accelerating land conversions in urban-fringe areas, as well as implications for effective policy responses. This book emphasizes the critical role of both spatial and economic-ecological interactions in contemporary land use, and the importance of a practical, policy-oriented perspective. Chapters illustrate an interaction of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical approaches to land-use policy and highlight advances in policy-oriented economics associated with the conservation and development of urban-fringe land. Issues addressed include (1) the appropriate role of economics in land-use policy, (2) forecasting and management of land conversion, (3) interactions among land use, property values, and local taxes, and (4) relationships among rural amenities, rural character, and urban-fringe land-use policy. Economics and Contemporary Land-Use Policy is a timely and relevant contribution to the land-use policy debate and will prove an essential reference for policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels. It will also be of interest to students, academics, and anyone with an interest in the practical application of economics to land-use issues.

Farmland preservation policies and programs have been in place at the national, state, and local levels since the 1970s in the United States. Features in landowners' stated preferences for these programs are critical in evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency in designing and implementing these policy programs. Quite a few behavioral studies have already been done in this field. However, most of these studies were associated with an implicit assumption--Independent and Identical Distribution (IID) in setting up choice models. This assumption not only eliminates the variation in the personal preference for a farmland preservation program among individuals, but also denies the interdependence among an individual landowner's preferences for several preservation programs. Technically, this assumption introduces bias and inefficiency into modeling. Without convincible justification, the involvement of IID could lead to biased model estimates and distort the interpretation. Unfortunately, such justification is barely mentioned and/or addressed at all in these studies. People are different, so do their preferences. Moreover, personal preferences for several preservation programs are simultaneously constrained by one's social-economic context. With such acknowledgements, both the variation in the personal preference for a farmland program and the interdependences among preferences for several programs are particular of the interest in this research. A modeling framework centering on a system of heteroscedastic probit models is calibrated to achieve unbiasedness and efficiency in implementing and evaluating preservation programs. A dataset from the state-level urban-fringe landowners' survey in 2001 and 2002 collected by the research team in American Farmland Trust (AFT) is used in this research. The survey covers fifty metropolitan counties in five states, i.e., Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Texas, and California. 1617 landowners were contacted either by phone calls or by mail. Farmland preservation programs concerned in the survey includes the agricultural zoning, the Purchase of Development Rights, the Purchase of Conservation Easements in California, and the use-value taxation programs. The personal preference for a preservation program is expected to be influenced by owners' social-economic circumstances, farmland characteristics, objectives of land ownership, and local social-economic conditions. Significant findings of related factors in shaping a landowner's preference for a preservation program from literature are referred for its generalization meanings. The result shows that the modeling framework based on a system of heteroscedastic probit models succeeds in explicitly capturing variations in and interdependence among personal preferences for several farmland preservation programs. The modeling framework can be generalized regardless of the geographic settings, i.e., state-level and/or county-level. The significance and magnitude of an individual factor effecting on one's preference for a preservation program, however, cannot be generalized across geographic boundaries, i.e., they are more of localized. Meanwhile, findings of the effect of individual factors are not precisely consistent with those from other studies. Suggestions for effective and efficient policy implementation are derived from findings of effects of individual factors on personal preferences for preservation programs. The dissertation consists of five chapters. The first two briefly describe the history of farmland preservation programs and the necessity of policy evaluation in the United States. Chapter three mainly puts efforts in describing and comparing features of available discrete choice models in dealing with complicated individual behaviors, and then a desired modeling framework is carefully described in details. Chapter four reports the model calibration process and model estimates with empirical data. Propositions to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the policy implementation are also delivered here. The final chapter makes conclusion about the generalization of findings and gives hints for the future study.