Economic impacts of urban growth and urban sprawl on agriculture: A spatial analysis of land use change at the urban-rural fringe
Abstract
In agricultural regions like the Corn Belt, urbanization tends to take place at the expense of farmland. Dealing with the loss of arable area, increased farmland prices, as well as positive and negative externalities related to the proximity to urban development, leaves farmers with two primary choices: switch to higher value production or sell farmland for development. Over the past several decades, the area expansion of American cities has outpaced population growth due to urban sprawl, which is characterized by low-density residential developments in suburban areas and the urban-rural fringe. This process fragments the periurban agricultural landscape as it progresses outwards. A key aspect of this dissertation is to include metrics of size and dispersion as critical determinants of the returns to agricultural production. We examine the crop allocation decisions of periurban farmers in the extended Indianapolis metropolitan area by estimating a system of simultaneous equations while also allowing for residual spatial autocorrelation. We specifically show that the creation a farmers' market fosters the conversion of nearby farmland to specialized crops. Finally, we use state-of-the-art spatial panel techniques to characterize the determinants of the development of farmland in southeast Wisconsin between 1963 and 2000. Our empirical results indicate that small and dispersed patches of agricultural land use are associated with a higher prevalence of high-valued crops and accelerated farmland loss.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Florax, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Geography|Agricultural economics
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