Falling reservoir levels at Lakes Mead and Powell are associated with fewer recreation visits. Policies to avoid Colorado River Basin shortage declarations benefit recreationists and local economies.
Facing an anticipated shortage declaration on the Colorado River and reductions in surface water for agricultural use, rural stakeholder groups are concerned about how water cutbacks will affect their local economies. Local farm groups and county governments often lack the analytical tools to measure such impacts. While one can learn much from large‐scale hydro‐economic models, data, cost, and time limitations have been barriers to such model development. This article introduces three basic modeling approaches, using relatively low‐cost and accessible data, to examine local economic impacts of water reallocations from agriculture. An empirical application estimates the effect of agricultural water reductions to Pinal County, Arizona, the county that would be most affected by a Colorado River Shortage Declaration. Water cutbacks to agriculture are modeled using two variants of a “rationing” model, which assumes that farmers will fallow their acres that generate the lowest gross returns (Rationing Model I) or the lowest net returns (Rationing Model II) per acre‐foot of water. Rationing models have modest data requirements given that crop and region specific data are available. Building off these simpler rationing models, an input‐output (I‐O) model provides more detailed information about the impacts on different rural stakeholder groups as well as the impacts to non‐agricultural sectors and the local tax base. Given imminent water cutbacks, access to low‐cost data and information that are easy to interpret is essential for effective community dialogue.
This analysis applies principles and methods from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Local Foods Toolkit to demonstrate the moderating influence of countervailing effects on the economic impacts of local food purchases through farm-toschool programs in Southern Arizona using USDA Farm to School Census data. The analysis applies and expands upon recommendations in the Toolkit, introducing the concept of export substitution and exploring how water resource constraints create tradeoffs for farms through crop-shifting and cropping rotations. The analysis reveals that for fruit and vegetable exporting regions, export substitution can be a major countervailing effect. Furthermore, the analysis examines the usefulness of the Farm to School Census as a secondary data source for estimating the economic impacts of local food activities, allowing us to make recommendations for how the Census could be expanded and supplemented for regional economic applications.
This analysis applies principles and methods from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Local Foods Toolkit to demonstrate the moderating influence of countervailing effects on the economic impacts of local food purchases through farm-toschool programs in Southern Arizona using USDA Farm to School Census data. The analysis applies and expands upon recommendations in the Toolkit, introducing the concept of export substitution and exploring how water resource constraints create tradeoffs for farms through crop-shifting and cropping rotations. The analysis reveals that for fruit and vegetable exporting regions, export substitution can be a major countervailing effect. Furthermore, the analysis examines the usefulness of the Farm to School Census as a secondary data source for estimating the economic impacts of local food activities, allowing us to make recommendations for how the Census could be expanded and supplemented for regional economic applications.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.