This contains two reports. The first is by authors from Statistical Research, Inc. that provides background information on the definition and application of the traditional cultural places designation under the National Historic Preservation Act. The second report is from the National Forest Service and expands on the first with examples of how traditional cultural places can be considered as part of land management planning.

This report is one of several from Statistical Research Inc. written to develop the Cultural and Historic Resources Element of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. Divided into four parts, the report summarizes available information that reflects the experience of (1) ancient peoples of Southern Arizona; (2) indigenous peoples; (3) non-indigenous peoples of the historical period; and (4) Pima County today.

This study covers the time period after 1200 A.D. in terms of the domestic landscape, the agricultural landscape, and the social landscape as the residents of southern Arizona adjust to upheaval and change in environmental and social conditions. This memorandum summarizes the study about the Classic Period and provides a comparison of findings and theories about area residents from both before and after 1200 A.D., which is the approximate time frame of the collapse and restructuring of cultural landscapes.

The theory of factor market distortions deals largely with taxing inputs. However, input subsidies are not only common in manufacturing. For example, U.S. agriculture is heavily dependent on input subsidies.
If water subsidies in the production of California cotton were removed, along with commodity payments, production of cotton in California would likely cease. Likewise, transportation subsidies were common in both the U.S. and Canada, and still prevail in the U.S.

After twenty years of Ag Mediation’s assistance to the American rural areas, there are a number of key developments which I would like to highlight for the Bureau of Land Management and others interested in mediation and dispute resolution. These include background, law, and efforts by states and federal government to focus on mediation as a way of settling disputes. Finally, I would like to enumerate the lessons we have learned.

Contains a dynamic programming algorithm for projecting policy parameters based on a storage model of international markets featuring uncertainty, forward-looking rational expectations and non-negative storage. This algorithm is motivated by the need for a non-analytical solution to the competitive equilibrium in a storage model of U.S. and foreign cotton policy regimes. Obtaining an analytical solution is difficult, except in a limited number of special cases. The numerical solution algorithm essentially consists of multiple nested numerical approximations that reach convergence simultaneously when the relationship between domestic storage and expected farm price achieves stationarity. Given the stationary relationship between storage and expected farm price, we then run the model forward in time (given a sequence of annual realized yield disturbances) under alternative policy regimes representing FACT and FAIR.

This paper provides a methodology that can be used to weigh the costs and benefits of precision agriculture in the measurement and application of variable-rate production technology. Empirical estimates of the economic value of precision farming in the form of variable-rate fertilizer application to corn fields in the mid-western United States are calculated and compared to the current cost of investing in this technology. The results of this study indicate that the use of precision technology in the application of fertilizer for corn production in the United States is not profitable over a relatively wide range of corn prices, nitrogen prices, and agronomic differences in soil characteristics.