This project has many foci as follows: (1) Examining factors that lead to local government fiscal stress, modeling fiscal stress conditions, and predicting the likelihood local governments will enter into a fiscal crisis. (2) Examining farmland change (mainly decrease) and the impact of metropolitan area increase on farming practices. (3) Studying specialty (high value) crop production and the extent to which there is spatial autocorrelation in sales of such products. (4)Assessing the possibility of “risk pooling” of farms producing special crops and the influence of this on alternatives for whole-farm insurance. (5) Developing alternative models for valuing farmland and vacant land in the Southern Tier counties of New York state.

The driving concern is how changes in agriculture in New York state are affecting economic and social life in rural communities. Also of concern is how the health or stress of local government influences local community institutions and citizen relationships. The project is valuable because few other researchers are concerned with rural communities, particularly how these economic trends affect rural life. The populations affected by this issue are small farmers and denizens of rural communities in New York state.

For the issue of fiscal stress, we examined trends across 25 years and attempted to develop a summary measure of fiscal stress for local governmental units. We then modeled this with factors that we felt might explain variation in fiscal stress conditions. For the changes in farmland, we examined changes in farmland since 1950 with particular attention to the differences between areas within metropolitan counties and those in nonmetropolitan counties. For the specialty crop production, we examined trends of changes to the sales through time and space.

Unfortunately, when dealing with economic policy at the levels of local and state government across a state as diverse as New York, it is not easy to assess impacts. Suggestions were made to the New York State Department of Budget and Office of the Comptroller five years ago, but it is unclear that much happened with these suggestions other than attending to communities we identified mutually as being in the most trouble. Hence, we helped lessen the fiscal stress in these communities.
In the case of our study of farmland changes in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties across the United States and in New York state, we made presentations to policy makers at a conference hosted by the Economic Research Service of USDA. We followed up with publication of a summary briefing paper for these researchers and regional policy makers, and we prepared a similar research brief for New York. It is unclear when (or if) this was ever distributed to stakeholders at the state and sub-state regional levels. The possible impact is that it helped some decision makers at the USDA or New York State Agriculture and Markets refine their thinking about the survivability of production agriculture in the growing metropolitan areas of the state.
On the specialty crop production research, the main thing we identified was that New York and adjoining states are in a region with a large concentration of such producers, and this is a production system with high survivability in metropolitan areas because of declining farmland acreage. Potential impacts are that policy makers, as well as agricultural producers, are enlightened by this research sufficiently to foster further growth of this production sector as an alternative to livestock, milk, and field crop sectors.

Multistate

New York State Office of Comptroller