Super-premium fruit and vegetable juices and drinks are a rapidly emerging product subcategory. We use retail-level scanner data to analyze trends in sales of and demand for super-premium and other fruit and vegetable beverages. We find that super-premium beverages represent a small share—about 6 percent in terms of dollar sales in 2012—of the overall fruit and vegetable juice and drink market and are priced considerably higher. Total sales more than doubled between 2007 and 2012 with 16 percent annual growth, and the beverages were more responsive to changes in price than other fruit and vegetable juices and drinks.

Water-quality markets that allow point-nonpoint trades assume that nonpoint best management practices (BMPs) achieve the targeted reductions as soon as they are implemented. However, changes in water quality in response to BMPs occur over time—from a few months to decades. We simulate emission allocations using static and dynamic-optimization models to determine whether a simple static allocation can produce results comparable economically and environmentally to complex multi-period designs for nitrogen emissions to Chesapeake Bay. We find that static rules provide relatively large cost savings compared to dynamic rules but result in a delay in achievement of water-quality targets.

Human fertility can affect agricultural production through its effect on supply of agricultural labor. Using the fact that in traditional, patriarchal societies, sons are generally preferred to daughters, we isolate exogenous variation in the number of children born to a mother and relate it to the agricultural labor supply and production in Uganda, which has a dominant agricultural sector and high fertility. We find that fertility has a sizable negative effect on household labor allocation to subsistence agriculture. Households with lower fertility devote significantly more time to land preparation and weeding; larger households grow less matooke and sweet potatoes. We find no significant effect on agricultural productivity in terms of yield per land area.

Virginia's growing agritourism industry provides additional income to farms and mitigates risk. This study empirically analyzes the effect of demographic, operational, and financial factors on the profitability of agritourism operations using a primary data set collected from a survey of more than 500 agritourism operations. Results show that greater profitability is associated with operators who are motivated by additional income and have more education, larger operations with a greater percentage of income from agritourism, and visitors who spent more on average. Characteristics having a negative effect on profitability are wineries, locations farther from interstates, and difficulty accessing capital.

Empirical studies suggest that cost-share programs are unlikely to reduce exploitation of ground water and nonpoint-source pollution. By introducing an induced irrigation technology in our model, we find theoretically that the optimal amount of irrigation water and nitrogen fertilizer increases (decreases) when the increased rate of the marginal net economic benefits from their use with an induced irrigation technology exceeds (is less than) an increase in the rate of irrigation efficiency. Our results suggest that producers should use relatively more irrigation water and fertilizer when greater quantities of high-value crops are grown because producers will adopt improved irrigation technologies for such crops.