Use of Applied Economics in the Arkansas-White-Red Cooperative River Basin Study

Excerpts from the report: The AWR Basin area is 11,300,000 acres (17,800 sq.mi.). The Basin is located in the northeast corner of the State. It is bounded on the north by Colorado, and on the east by Oklahoma and Texas. The Basin includes all of Union, Colfax, Mora, and Harding Counties, but only part of San Miguel, Quay, Curry, and Guadalupe Counties. The principal drainages are the Cimarron and Canadian Rivers and their tributaries. Land ownership is about 85 percent private, 13 percent State land, and 2 percent Federal. About 70 percent of the land is range land used primarily for grazing beef cattle, 11 percent is commercial forest, 11 percent is other woodlands, 6 percent if cropland, and 2 percent is in roads, cities and towns, and miscellaneous uses. The objectives of the Arkansas-White-Red Cooperative Basin Study were: (1) To identify present and impending problems pertaining to natural resource supply and quality, particularly as they affect agricultural production, farm revenues, and income and employment in agriculture and service industries. (2) To examine U.S. Department of Agriculture program potentials for overcoming natural-resource-related problems. This included estimating the economic and environmental effects of various potential program measures. The economic analysis described here centered mainly on projecting future economic conditions in the event that USDA programs remain at their status quo level of intensity, and also on projecting future economic effects produced by potential increases in the intensity of programs.