Effective teaching is a recurring topic of faculty discussion and disagreement. The title of my address suggests that effective teaching has two components. First and increasingly important, teaching has an empirical component. The empiricism of teaching asserts that there are identifiable traits of effective teaching that can be used to improve one's teaching experience. I want to share with you some insights we have gained from recent empirical studies on teaching and the teaching evaluation process. Second, there is the art of teaching or the intangible and creative component of teaching. I will speak on how the art of teaching can be refined. This I will do by way of offering some personal teaching tips that have at least made my teaching experience more enjoyable.

It appears the major private benefit from peer reviewed journals such as the Review of Agricultural Economics (RAE) is certification. To maintain public support for our journals, increased efforts are needed to demonstrate the social benefits from peer reviewed publications. Research cost considerations have led agricultural economists to emphasize applied disciplinary work using secondary data and to ignore the important work of careful data collection and reporting. Moreover, pressures to publish have led to more isolated research efforts ignoring other disciplines. Recommendations to improve the relevance of journal publications include more active efforts by journal editors to make applied journals such as RAE more accessible to the public.

Research on environmental and resources issues is interdisciplinary by nature. For example, studying the economics of pesticides may entail working with both entomologists to address pest problems and toxicologists to address the human health problems associated with pesticide use. Interdisciplinary efforts require familiarity with the findings of other disciplines as well as direct collaboration with professionals in other disciplines. This paper presents a somewhat personal perspective on the issues that economists may encounter in interdisciplinary work. It also presents suggestions on how to increase the acceptance of economic thinking /theory by professionals in other disciplines. The paper starts with a theoretical discussion on relations between disciplines and between professions, followed by discussion of the issues affecting the relationships of agricultural economists with other professions.

This article challenges the traditional model of the economist as a humble technocrat who simply provides analysis given the preferences of policy decision-makers. Since decision-makers rarely reveal their preferences, it is important that the would-be policy research/analyst know the political economy and be willing to identify potential performance goals for society. Researchers who are willing to incur the transaction cost associated with becoming involved in useful policy research must learn to work within the imperfect policy process. Policy research that considers the importance of implementation and that acknowledges the institutions and the history will have the highest chance of being useful to policy-makers.

The common thread running through these three papers is the quest for relevance in agricultural economics. Zilberman (DZ) is looking for acceptance and relevance in interdisciplinary research, Robison and Colyer (R&C) are looking for relevance in the professional journals, and Skees (JS) tells us how we can do relevant economic research for the policy process. I will discuss each paper in turn and then try to draw a relevant conclusion.

Robinson and Colyer, Skees, and Zilberman offer a number of propositions for improving economists' impact on public policy. Unanswered is what the potential impact on policy would be if these propositions are fulfilled. Couching these propositions in economic theory provides some clues for answering this question. Thus, the main point of this discussion is outlining the role that theory can play in developing hypotheses on the potential impact of these alternative propositions.

Pesticide use is regulated within a complex legal framework that includes the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act; and other environmental laws. The framework includes risk-benefit rules for some decisions that permit full consideration of comparative performance, cost, and risks of a pesticide and its alternatives before decisions to permit or ban uses. The framework also includes risk-only standards, such as the Delaney Clause, that prohibit such comparisons and can have unintended and undesirable consequences by increasing health or environmental risks while increasing the cost of producing agricultural commodities.

Agricultural sustainability is an evolving process ever-seeking a balance between society's economic, environmental and social demands. Governmental policy and regulations while attempting to correct adverse externalities, have at times within themselves created adverse externalities. Failures often lie within the policies themselves, but poor coordination among government agencies is also at fault. This paper outlines a number of coordination issues and attempts to show how the empowerment of communities through ecosystem management is a partial solution to environmental degradation.

The federal government program for wetlands regulation is administered by the United States Army Corps of Engineers pursuant to Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. Proposals for amending and/or reforming the Section 404 program are included in Congressional deliberations regarding Clean Water Act reauthorization. Specific issues of public policy include the definition of “waters of the United States”, criteria for delineation of jurisdictional wetlands, definition of activities exempt from regulation, mitigation and classification of wetlands, and issues of property rights.

Little doubt remains that agricultural operations will be increasingly constrained by environmental regulations. In that spirit, each of the foregoing authors has provided a general framework for a specific environmental issue as it impacts agriculturalists. I learned something from each paper (an important criterion). Rather than summarize the points made by the authors, I have chosen to address each paper separately and point out some specific issues which I feel were overlooked in the papers or which seem to follow directly from the discussions in the papers.

The three papers presented here made interesting reading, provided much food for thought, and gave evidence of a great deal of effort.

The moderator asked us to pay special attention to how well each paper addresses “the struggle between environmental regulation and the policy of maintaining cheap food”. I will attempt to deal with this and to give my reaction to other related issues that come to mind.

In the 1980s, few agricultural economists, particularly from the Southern Region, published works on international trade or the globalization of the world economy. The initiation of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986 stimulated such writings as the Southern Agriculture in a World Economy series by the Southern Region Extension International Trade Task Force (Rosson et al.). An even smaller number of agricultural economists were writing on policy linkages between trade and the environment. An early effort to remedy this situation was the Workshop on Linkages between Natural Resources and International Trade in Agricultural Commodities (Sutton).

This paper introduces and briefly discusses the economics of two important trade and environment policy issues--international harmonization of environmental standards and the use of trade measures for environmental purposes. Both issues are likely to generate lively international debate among environmentalists, industry representatives, and trade negotiators over the next few years. As the international community seeks new multilateral rules in these areas, agricultural producers will want to know how they will be affected. Thus, this paper also examines the potential impacts of environmental policy on the competitiveness of commodities unique to the Southern region of the United States.

Seale and Fairchild cover an ambitious array of issues in their paper on “Trade Agreements, Competition, and the Environment”. Perhaps it is this ambition that leads their discussion to be too generalized in some areas. Their paper is organized into several sections: (1) a review of trade theory and generalizations about resource use (“GATT or NAFTA, Does it matter?”); (2) issues that link trade and environmental policy; (3) observations on shifts in U.S. trade policy behavior; and (4) perspectives on the changes and adjustment facing southern agriculture. I would like to challenge some of their assertions about regional trading blocs, and the environment and resource use.

The southern perspective provided in the Seale and Fairchild paper makes this paper especially interesting as an overview of concerns related to the use of trade policies to advance environmental objectives on a global scale. With the exception of their “World Environmental Bank” idea, it is easy for me to agree with most of their points and their underlying premise that the development of trade policies based on environmental priorities represents an effort to link the inaccurate with the unstable.

The rice stink bug is a major pest of rice in Texas, causing quality related damage. The previous thresholds used for assisting in rice stink bug spray decisions lacked flexibility in economic and production decision variables and neglected the dynamics of the pest population. Using stochastic dynamic programming, flexible economic thresholds for the rice stink bug were generated. The new thresholds offer several advantages over the old, static thresholds, including increased net returns, incorporation of pest dynamics, user flexibility, ease of implementation, and a systematic process for updating.

The 1990 Farm Bill reduces deficiency payments but also provides more planting flexibility for program participants. In this study, a mean-standard deviation analysis is used to analyze the impacts of planting flexibility provisions on crop selection decisions, farm returns, and farm risk. Results show that gains from the added planting flexibility do not offset the mandatory loss in the deficiency payments for program participants. Planting flexibility will lead to an increase in corn and wheat planted in the Northern Plains and an increase in cotton planted in the Rolling Plains and Coastal Bend, Texas.

Factors influencing the adoption of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) techniques are studied using survey data from individual vegetable producers from Florida, Michigan, and Texas. Farmers who adopt IPM tend to be less risk averse and use more managerial time on farm activities than nonadopters. Adopters are also more likely to operate large, irrigated farms and use more family labor. Locational factors and the type of crop grown are also influential in IPM adoption. The analysis uses a logit framework and introduces adopter categories first conceptualized by rural sociologists.