Ray G. Huffaker

A Theoretical Analysis of Economic Incentive Policies Encouraging Agricultural Water Conservation

A conceptual model of a representative irrigated farm is formulated to study farm responses to two economic policies commonly suggested to encourage agricultural water conservation, and to characterize the hydrological and economic circumstances in which these responses provide the desired conservation. The economic policies studied are to increase the irrigators cost of applied water and to subsidize the irrigators cost of investing in improved on-farm irrigation efficiency. Comparative statics results demonstrate that increasing the cost of applied water may be a more effectual water conservation policy than subsidizing the cost of improved on-farm irrigation efficiency.

The Role of Prior Appropriation in Allocating Water Resources into the 21st Century

This article demonstrates how widespread technological changes in agriculture have weakened the security of traditional appropriative water rights. Since legal protection of these rights has severely restricted the use of transfer mechanisms to reallocate water to emerging social needs, this demonstration provides a powerful and novel argument for increasing the flexibility of the prior appropriation system and operating it in conjunction with other legitimate water-allocation doctrines protecting public interests in water.

Optimal Control of Vector-Virus-Plant Interactions: The Case of Potato Leafroll Virus Net Necrosis

This paper introduces a new specification to the economic pest management literature designed to optimally manage vector-virus-plant interactions for a single crop. The viral, insect-vector, and plant-host stocks are treated as renewable resources and conjunctively controlled in a discrete-time control framework subject to crop quality standards established in marketing contracts. The result is a conceptual integrated pest management model providing optimal insecticide scheduling and dynamic decision-making thresholds in a novel economic pest management context. Model results are compared qualitatively with those from previous specifications. The model is applied empirically to control potato leafroll virus net necrosis in commercial potato production.

Water Policy Issues for the Twenty-first Century

Water resource management throughout the nation is looming as one of the most important political, social, and economic issues of the approaching century. While water allocation and water quality describe the issues of the past and the future, growing and changing social demands for available water, changing technologies, and outdated laws and institutions for water allocation combine to create new opportunities for the attention of economists for the next several decades. The role of economists in this

Controlling transboundary wildlife damage: modeling under alternative management scenarios

Abstract The migratory nature of nuisance wildlife populations creates a special management problem by imposing a negative diffusion externality on landowners undertaking control efforts. This paper reviews three cost-minimizing wildlife-control models, each internalizing the diffusion externality under different management scenarios, namely, unilateral management, bilateral management, and centralized management. The three management scenarios lead to different optimal behaviors. Property owners exerting unilateral control must leave some wildlife untrapped to generate sufficient population pressure against the flow of continual immigration from neighboring populations. Analysis of the bilateral model indicates that noncooperating neighboring landowners having varying pay-off functions will end up with leaving all wildlife untraped in their parcels. Under the centralized management scenario, landowners find it most profitable to collectively delegate the control responsibility of an entire watershed to a single manager.

Animal Stocking under Conditions of Declining Forage Nutrients

This paper examines the bioeconomic conditions under which the recently popular intensive-early-stocking (IES) strategy outperforms the conventional season-long-stocking (SLS) strategy as a response to the deterioration of forage nutrients over the latter stages of the grazing season. The economic performances of the IES and SLS strategies are compared to a dynamically optimal grazing policy that continually fine tunes stocking rates to account for declining forage nutrients. The comparisons yield a range of qualitative properties under which the IES strategy tends to approximate better the optimal strategy, some of which are investigated in a numerical illustration.

Private Property Rights and Forest Preservation in Karnataka Western Ghats, India

Areca nut orchard owners have been mulching their orchards with foliage from surrounding government-owned deciduous forests at an average rate that may well deplete foliage within a decade, thereby endangering the long-term viability of the regions most profitable agricultural enterprise. A bioeconomic model of areca nut production is formulated to determine the circumstances under which privatization of forest resources in the hands of orchard owners will stem this rapid depletion. An empirical application suggests that foliage is not currently sufficiently abundant to survive privatization; however, the prospects for preservation can be increased with the imposition of a preprivatization period of regulated use.

The long-term bioeconomic impacts of grazing on plant succession in a rangeland ecosystem

Abstract The on-site environmental impacts of for-profit livestock grazing on private rangeland are conceptualized as an interdependent pair of interrelated-species models defined over different time scales. Slow-manifold theory links the fast (annual) dynamics of an optimization-based grazing-decision submodel (formulating the predator-prey relationship between livestock and vegetation), with the slow (decade) dynamics of a species-competition submodel (specifying grazing-induced succession from perennial grasses to less environmentally-desirable annual species). A stable manifold (partitioning phase space into basins-of-attraction to equilibria representing plant states of differing social desirability) is analytically approximated, and the approximation is analyzed for its mathematical accuracy under various bioeconomic conditions. The approximated stable manifold represents a ‘successional threshold’ measuring the resilience of the rangeland ecosystem in recovering from historic overgrazing. The successional threshold provides a means of evaluating the environmental efficacy of agricultural programs which would promote recovery of private rangeland by offering financial incentives to induce for-profit livestock enterprises to reduce grazing

Optimal Management of Game and Forage Resources in a Private Fee-Hunting Enterprise

The paper formulates a bioeconomic model of a private fee-hunting enterprise to examine the optimal management of this agroecological system under a wide range of bioeconomic circumstances. An empirical application demonstrates that the economic viability of the enterprise (concerning managers) and the sustainability of the underlying biological resources (concerning public regulators) depend critically on the initial endowment of resources and on the existence of publicly-mandated or self-imposed restrictions on maximum allowable hunting rates. Perhaps surprising is the implication that in some circumstances regulators may be able to promote resource sustainability by relaxing hunting controls.

Deterministic Modeling without (Unwarranted) Apology

The risk literature in agricultural economics asserts that deterministic methods ignore important sources of uncertainty, and thus strongly discourages their use to model economic behavior, performance, and welfare. This paper applies principles of randomness drawn from the philosophy of science literature to investigate this assertion and to formulate proper implications for the appropriate use of deterministic methods under uncertainty. The results specify the circumstances under which a deterministic approach offers a scientifically credible alternative to a probabilistic approach in accounting for uncertainty.