PRORURUL: PROTECTING AGRICULTURAL LAND IN RURAL LANDSCAPES EXPERIENCING URBAN AND LOW-DENSITY RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENTS

The u.s. has an increasing demand for developed land, and agricultural lands are being converted to meet that need. from 2001 to 2016, 11 million acres of american farmland were converted for development, of which 4.4 million occurred on america's highest-productivity agricultural lands, and 6.8 million were converted to low-density development. balancing housing and food supply is an important societal issue, and the u.s. has implemented a suite of land use policies to balance agricultural production with development needs, but there is limited empirical evidence describing the effectiveness of those policies in reducing farmland conversion or their potential to shift conversion to neighboring locations (i.e. leakage). this project addresses this gap through a multi-scalar investigation of farmland conversion and its relationship to state and federal agricultural retention policies. building on american farmland trust's 'farmlands under threat' project, we will develop a comprehensive national database of factors associated with farmland loss (i.e., the prorurul database), and we will use spatial econometric and causal identification strategies to evaluate a) the drivers of farmland loss, b) the impact of policies on the rates and patterns of farmland loss, and c) policy leakage across multiple scales and for different agricultural production systems. the database, the methods developed, and the knowledge gained from this research will form a foundation for future research to measure how different policies influence economic outcomes, trade-offs and externalities associated with the expansion of the built environment into rural, agrarian landscapes.