Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Minutes from the annual meeting last year were read and approved by the members present. Bill Huth of the University of West Florida was elected secretary of SERA 30 for the upcoming year. Osei-Agyeman Yeboah of North Carolina A&T University will serve as Vice-President and John Westra of Louisiana State University will serve as President of SERA 30 next year. The next meeting is scheduled to be held in Washington DC and be "hosted" by USDA-CSREES. During the business meeting, SERA 30 members decided to accept Fenn Hunt's suggestion/offer to meet in Washington DC and interact with USDA-CSREES program leaders as well as economists from USDA-ERS and USEPA, among other agencies. The main themes for the 2008 program will be determined by an interactive process of SERA 30 members led by Michael Thomas of Florida A&M University and assisted by Terry Hanson of Mississippi State University. Mike will be emailing SERA 30 members to solicit ideas and suggestions for main themes for the workshop/conference in 2008. These themes may reflect focus areas for USDA-CSREES in the 2008-2009 fiscal years. The next meeting will be held after graduation but before Memorial Day weekend - probably the week of May 19 - 23, 2008, but no firm dates yet. The meeting space will most likely be the USDA-CSREES conference room(s). Arrangements for hotel accommodations are being pursued by a committee led by Fenn Hunt of USDA-CSREES and John Westra of Louisiana State University. An invited paper session for the Southern Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meeting was discussed and it was decided that a proposal would be submitted on economic effects and impacts of invasive species in the Southern U.S. The annual meeting and workshop of SERA 30 was held in conjunction with CNREP 2007, the second annual conference on Challenges of Natural Resource Economics and Policy that LSU's Center for Natural Resource Economics and Policy (CNREP) conducts. Registration fees for this jointly-held workshop and conference year were insufficient to cover expenses associated with the annual meeting. Sponsorship by several organizations, including continued support from the Farm Foundation helped to defray some, but not all of the expenses associated with the meetings. The host institution, LSU, had to cover the remaining shortfall in revenues from registration fees and sponsorships. We discussed the difficulty in finding the proceedings of SERA 30 meetings that have been posted on Southern Rural Development Center's website at Mississippi State University. Krishna Paudel of LSU indicated that he has been unsuccessful in gathering minutes from business meetings and abstracts of papers presented at meetings prior to 1999. Evidently the few remaining hard copies of this material are scarce. Terry Hanson from Mississippi State University suggested a few individuals (John Reynolds, retired U of FL; John Bergstrom, U of GA; Webb Smathers, Clemson; Upton Hatch, NC State; Martin Redfern, U of AR; past SERA 30 administrative advisors and Farm Foundation who funded the printing annually) who may have hard copies that could be scanned and placed on the SERA 30 website that LSU Department of Agricultural Economics is now hosting. John Westra reported that Bob Shulstad, from the University of George, had reported via email that renewal of SERA 30 was approved last fall after John Westra had submitted a revised project proposal Application and Appendix forms E into the NIMSS system. The approval is valid through September 30, 2009. http://www.nimss.umd.edu/homepages/home.cfm?trackID=6576 Walter Armbruster of the Farm Foundation requested an issue report from the meeting. These are lay-oriented presentation of some core theme with supporting information from specific presentations or papers presented at the meetings, similar to an executive summary of one or two key themes from the meeting. John Westra at LSU is coordinating this effort so suggestions and materials should be sent to him by the end of June, 2007.

For each SERA 30 meeting, a major topic and a subtopic relevant to southern agriculture and natural resources are chosen. A call for papers went out to a wide range of individuals, including those outside the group. In the 2007 meeting, participants focused on valuing coastal resource amenities and the economics and environmental impacts of natural resource management. This year we were successful in attracting papers by several individuals outside the group. In addition to the three papers by non-SERA 30 researchers, nine papers were presented by members of SERA 30. Additionally, several posters were developed and "presented" during the SERA 30/CNREP 2007 conference. Four papers presented research on the first main theme of the SERA 30 meeting - valuing coastal resource amenities. Hindsley et al., from East Carolina University, described how congestion affects recreational beach site selection in North Carolina. Continuing the North Carolina coastal theme, Whitehead et al., of Appalachian State University, estimated the economic benefits of recreational boating on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (AIWW). Next we moved down to the Florida coast where Huth et al. of the University of West Florida estimated the demand of divers for large ship artificial reefs. Last Keithly et al. of LSU estimated the value of various types of wetlands and open water in coastal Louisiana. The second theme - the economics and environmental impacts of natural resource managemeny - had eight papers and was divided into two sessions. Ban Banerjee from Mississippi State University presented research on forecasting water demand and crop values. Water demand, in the form of irrigation management strategies and how risk aversion affects this was presented by Lin et al. from the University of Georgia. Paudel and Dunn continued the water demand topic with a case study of the optimal allocation of groundwater from the Sparta Aquifer. Last in that session, Paudel et al. went underground to analyze the spatial distribution and infestation of Formosan Subterranean Termites. In the second session for the second them, the topic of invasive species was picked up by Salaudeen et al. from Florida A&M University who described how Tropical Soda Apples are having an adverse economic affect on cattle production in Florida. Tyler et al., from LSU, continued the livestock subject by presenting ideas on how the growth in the U.S. livestock sector faces environmental challenges in applying phosphorus to the land so as not to adversely affect water quality. The water quality topic was continued by Broussard and Westra, from LSU, who described how government commodity programs affect crop selection and land management in the U.S. and how those impact water quality in the Mississippi River Basin and contribute to the hypoxia problem in the Gulf of Mexico. Paudel and Bhattarai, from LSU, ended the session by talking about how to economically apply poultry litter for crop nutrients but to not create water quality problems in the process. Titles of all the papers presented can be found in the publications list following. These papers will be published in proceedings later in 2007 and posted to the SERA 30 website and the Farm Foundation website.

The Role of Congestion in Recreational Beach Site Choice Paul Hindsley, Craig Landry, Okmyung Bin, and Has Vogelsong, East Carolina University A Determination of the Economic Benefits and Economic Impacts of Recreation Boating on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (AIWW) in North Carolina, USA John Whitehead, Appalachian State University; Jim Herstine and Chris Dumas, University of North Carolina Wilmington Diving Demand for Large Ship Artificial Reefs Ash Morgan, Bill Huth, and Greg Martin, University of West Florida The Value of Wetlands versus Open Water in Louisiana Walter R. Keithly, Jr. and Baifu Xu, LSU; John Barras, USGS; and Richard F. Kazmierczak, Jr., LSU Role of Forecasting Water Demand and Crop Value in Agriculture Swagata Ban Banerjee and Steven W. Martin, Mississippi State University Influence of Risk Aversion on Optimal Irrigation Management Strategies Shanshan Lin, Jeffrey D. Mullen, and Gerrit Hoogenboom, University of Georgia Optimal Allocation of Shared Ground Water: A Case of Sparta Aquifer in Louisiana Krishna Paudel and Michael Dunn, LSU A Spatial Model of Formosan Subterranean Termite Spread and Infestation in Louisiana Junpyo Hong, Krishna Paudel, and Michael Dunn, LSU Economic Impact of Tropical Soda Apple on Cattle Production in Florida Tajudeen Tayo Salaudeen and Michael H. Thomas, Florida A&M University; David Harding, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Growing the U.S. Livestock Economy: The Environmental (Phosphorus Assimilation) Challenge Tyler Mark, Louisiana State University; Allan Gray, Brad Joern, and Michael Boehlje, Purdue University Agricultural Policy, Land Management, and Water Quality in the Mississippi River Basin: An Economic Temporal and Spatial Analysis Whitney Broussard and John V. Westra, LSU A GIS-based Economic Model for Optimal Use of Broiler Litter as Crop Nutrients in Louisiana Krishna Paudel, LSU; and Keshav Bhattarai, University of Central Missouri