LU-CAEHS Research Seminar

"The Myth of Spatial Contagion? What Really Drives Cropland Expansion in Missouri"

Recent cropland expansion in Missouri has come almost entirely out of grass rather than forest or wetland. Pasture and hay ground in the northern grain belt and the southwest strip has gone under the plow, while the heavily forested Ozark highlands have been excluded from crop production, leaving expansion concentrated in a few regions rather than spread across the state.

Understanding whether this clustered expansion is driven by genuine spatial contagion, where land conversion spreads across county borders through behavioral neighbor influence, matters for targeting conservation programs and anticipating where conversion happens next.

This study uses land cover data from the National Land Cover Database and farm economic data from the Census of Agriculture across 114 Missouri counties from 2011 to 2021 to investigate the role of apparent spatial contagion in farmland conversion. Results show that cropland expansion is not spreading between neighboring counties so
much as following where convertible pasture already sits. The findings suggest spatially clustered land endowments should be considered before economic and behavioral factors. In addition, expansion concentrated in the pasture regions points to growing tensions in grazing availability, hay supply, and pasture rental competition in Missouri.

About the presenter:

Dr. Lan Tran holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics (Natural Resource and Environmental Economics emphasis) and an M.A. in Applied Statistics from the University of Missouri-Columbia. His work focuses on developing decision-support tools and predictive policy models that help agribusiness stakeholders build climate resilience and improve input efficiency under shifting resource and market conditions. Methodologically, he brings expertise in econometric and optimization modeling, frontier analysis, spatial analysis, discrete choice and field experiments, and latent variable models.

Complementing this production and policy focus, he examines consumer preferences for local food, sustainable attributes, and novel bio-based products, providing demandside insights that inform both market strategy and policy design. His current research develops adoption models of farm-level soil health practices and spatial models of Missouri land use change, treating structural absence as informative rather than as noise.