The transition incentive program and women farmers in the USA

Abstract

The US Department of Agriculture made women farmers eligible for the Transition Incentive Program (TIP) to improve their access to farmland. TIP is a federal program that transfers near-expiring lands in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) back to agricultural use while maintaining established conservation practices. It offers incentives to landowners and requires recipients to adhere to specific conservation plans on the acquired land. Since women have shown a stronger interest in sustainable practices and face more limited access to land, TIP has the potential to enhance women’s presence in farming. However, the program’s effectiveness has not been evaluated.

In this paper, we analyze county-level data from the 2017 Census of Agriculture and data on actual TIP use to provide the first estimates of the causal effect of TIP on the presence of women farmers. We use three matching techniques – nearest neighbor, kernel nearest neighbor, and inverse probability weighting – and find a small but statistically significant positive effect. While a comparison of the share of women farmers in non-matched counties with and without TIP-enrolled lands shows that counties with TIP use have fewer women farmers, the matched results indicate that utilizing TIP increased the proportion of women farmers by one percent, or about 805 women, in the study region. The Rosenbaum bounds sensitivity test shows that the results are stable. We conclude that TIP is marginally effective at increasing the number of women in agriculture.