No abstract

Phosphorus (P) is essential for optimum agricultural production, but it also causes water quality degradation when lost through erosion (sediment‐attached P), runoff (soluble reactive P; SRP), or leaching (sediment‐attached P or SRP). Implementation of conservation practices (CP) affects P at the source (avoiding), during transport (controlling), or at the water resource edge (trapping). Trade‐offs often occur with CP implementation. For instance, multiple researchers have shown that conservation tillage reduces total P by over 50%, while increasing SRP by upward of 40%. Conservation tillage may increase water quality degradation as SRP is more bioavailable than is particulate P. Conservation practices must be implemented as a system of practices to increase redundancy and to address all loss pathways, such as P management with conservation tillage and a riparian buffer. Further, planning and adoption must be at a watershed scale to ensure practices are placed in critical source areas, thereby providing the most treatment for the least price. Farmers must be involved in watershed planning, which should include financial backstopping and educational outreach. It is imperative that CPs be used more effectively to reduce and retard off‐site P losses. New and innovative CPs are needed to improve control of P leaching, address legacy stores of soil test P, and mitigate increased P losses expected with climate change. Without immediate changes to CP implementation, P losses will increase due to climate change, with a concomitant degradation of water quality. These changes must be made at a watershed scale and in an intentional and transparent manner. Core Ideas Phosphorus‐reducing conservation practices must control all P pathways. Phosphorus‐reducing conservation practices must be utilized as systems. New and innovative conservation practices are needed to improve control of P. Farmer decision‐making must be considered when implementing conservation practices. Watershed planning and conservation practice implementation must be intentional.

This chapter focses on compensation for livestock when the government orders their destruction to stop or control the spread of livestock diseases. It examines: the reason for offering compensation; the current compensation schemes from the US federal government's perspective; issues that make fair compensation difficult to achieve; and compensation alternatives, including insurance, industry-generated compensation funds, and a permit/assurance bonding scheme.

The first section of this chapter discusses insurance as a risk management issue. The insurability conditions for livestock disease insurance are then discussed, namely: losses should be determinable and measurable; losses should be accidental and unintentional; there should be sufficient information to conduct risk classification; there should be sufficient data to establish accurate premium rates; losses should be sufficiently uncorrelated to allow for pooling; and premiums should be economically feasible. The third major section discusses potential policy tools in the context of insurability conditions in the USA. It reviews the APHIS indemnification programme, private disease insurance, government disease insurance, and business interruption insurance among others. A matrix is proposed to compare risk management tools with insurability conditions. Finally, challenges and opportunities of disease risk management tools are explored.

We measure the significance of heterogeneous land quality in determining the efficacy of commodity program acreage reduction requirements in reducing farm output. Field‐level analysis isolates the influence of land productivity from other factors to gauge the importance of the land decisions on slippage. Results from six North Carolina counties for 1985–88 show that yield increases from the diversion of low‐quality land by individual farmers contribute relatively little to aggregate increases in average yield. The results are consistent with other studies finding that slippage is a result of interregional effects rather than of intraregional or intrafarm effects.