About

Jonathan W. Coppess is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois. His profile is listed among the university's faculty involved in farmdoc daily articles and related research activities. The page indicates his affiliation with the university's Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics and the farmdoc project, which focuses on farm management, agricultural policy, and related tools and research. Specific details about his research focus, background, or key contributions are not provided in the page text.

Research topics

• Geography
• Environmental science
• Agroforestry
• Environmental resource management
• Political Science
• Economics
• Soil science
• Natural resource economics
• Business
• Agricultural engineering
• Ecology
• Agricultural economics
• Environmental planning
• Agronomy
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-by-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm

  Agricultural History · 2025-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The authors of Empty Fields, Empty Promises have produced a great resource on a seemingly obscure legal topic. Right-to-farm (RTF) laws provide protections from nuisance lawsuits for agricultural operations. This book is thought-provoking, connecting to concerns about concentration in the farming and food sectors, fundamental issues like property rights and democracy, as well as the environment and the hollowing out of rural America. The authors establish the scope of their ambition early, explaining how statutes enacted with the intent to protect farmers from the cost and hassle of nuisance suits by new neighbors “began to fundamentally change the meaning of private property rights in the United States” with implications stretching far beyond the farm's gate (3).The middle section of the book provides a comprehensive resource for teachers, researchers, and students. The authors have compiled an impressive state-by-state survey of RTF laws, summarizing each and providing important context, such as court interpretations that benefit the largest, most sophisticated concentrated or vertically integrated operations with overwhelming legal protections. RTF laws are generally designed to provide protection to agricultural operations from nuisance lawsuits, such as for noise, smells, dust, or similar externalities of farming, that might be brought by neighboring property owners. RTF statutes provide immunity for those who have been in operation for at least a year, but without distinguishing types of operations or what happens if the farming operation undergoes substantial changes. The law makes no distinction between a small, diversified farm producing a variety of crops and livestock, on the one hand, and a concentrated animal-feeding operation (CAFO) with tens of thousands of animals under one or a few buildings producing massive amounts of waste, on the other. Moreover, protections intended for farmers have been expanded by courts to include meat processing facilities, paper production facilities, and timber processors. The result, as the authors detail, is that such nuisance protections have vastly overprotected business firms and facilitated further concentration in the sector, while also driving away other farmers and rural residents who do not want to live next to or near such facilities. Worse yet, the burdens fall even more disproportionately and disturbingly on the poorest residents, especially minorities in Southern states. Such residents are less able to move and even less able to take on concentrated, vertically integrated businesses, a result that adds further to troubling historical baggage.Beginning in Alabama in 1978, states codified common-law concepts known as “coming to the nuisance,” but the timing also roots these laws in the nearly decade-long economic and environmental crisis in American agriculture; based on the summary of state RTF laws, twenty-six states had enacted RTF laws by 1981, and forty states by 1982. The historical context also complicates the analysis and conclusions. The authors focus, for example, on the decline in the number of farms and the rise of large, concentrated, and businesslike farming operations, most notably CAFOs. One challenge is that, while these developments roughly correspond to the enactment of RTF laws, it is difficult to attribute causation. Given the history of agricultural development in the United States, the RTF laws may have suffered much the same fate as family farms: consumed and co-opted at the same time, laws meant to protect family farmers from changing circumstances in the area, such as suburban and exurban sprawl, became useful tools for operations to concentrate further. The book provides clear evidence that CAFOs and “business firms” have much more success in RTF lawsuits than small farmers and sole proprietor farmers.The authors’ contribution to this difficult and tangled history is an important one. The first and third sections provide a very challenging exploration of the issues, as well as attempting suggestions for reforms of the law to better protect both homes and family farms. They detail how this development impacts the health and well-being of rural residents and entire communities, from water quality to bacteria and antibiotic drug resistance. These are incredibly difficult and complex issues that are also of immense importance. One challenge is the book's tendency to drift from the core issue and lose focus by attempting to connect everything from federal farm subsidies to Farm Bureau insurance businesses and monopolies and oligopolies. The book also struggles to provide realistic and effective recommendations for reforming RTF laws that will also reform agriculture, protect the environment, and restore rural America. These are noble goals that should not be judged unfairly nor harshly critiqued; rather, they highlight the prevalent, pointed, and extraordinarily difficult challenges for reforms against entrenched powers that benefit from the status quo.

  PublisherDOI

• Greenhouse Gas Accounting Procedures in Low Carbon Fuel Policies Overlook the Spatial Variability of Miscanthus-Derived Sustainable Aviation Fuel

  ACS Sustainable Resource Management · 2025-06-30 · 3 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Policy Design Lab: Visualizing and Analyzing U.S. Federal Agricultural, Conservation, and Food Policies

  2025-09-15

  articleSenior author

  Federal agricultural, conservation and food assistance programs are critical policies for the agricultural and food sectors. Historically, these policies have been reauthorized by the United States Congress every five years. Also known as the Farm Bill, it authorizes four major categories of mandatory spending programs, distributing benefits to those entitled to receive them. These four categories align with the following titles in the Farm Bill: Title I: Commodities; Title II: Conservation; Title XI: Crop Insurance; and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program under Title IV: Nutrition. We present the Policy Design Lab, a comprehensive web platform for data visualization and analysis of policy data. The core goal is to better inform policymakers, the public and other stakeholders to improve policy understanding, as well as to provide comparative analysis of policy design alternatives and innovations. It provides a powerful tool for designing, considering and evaluating different scenarios by visualizing data and modeling the likely outcomes of the various designs. We describe the main modules of this web platform, the design and development process, and the integration of two models that support policy analysis and design.

  PublisherDOI

• Greenhouse Gas Accounting Procedures in Low Carbon Fuel Policies Overlook the Spatial Variability of Miscanthus-derived Sustainable Aviation Fuel

  ChemRxiv · 2025-06-13

  preprintOpen access

  Low carbon fuel policies such as the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), Canada Clean Fuel Regulations (CFR), and California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) as well as the 45Z tax credit are intended to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transportation. Cellulosic feedstocks, optimized biorefineries, and favorable farming locations can significantly reduce biofuel carbon intensity (CI). Despite advances in field-to-fuel GHG monitoring and flexibility in resource allocation within biorefineries (e.g., governing net electricity production), rigid CI accounting procedures in current policies may limit CI responsiveness across candidate sites and processing facilities. This work examines a hypothetical biomass-to-sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) pathway using miscanthus and alcohol-to-jet (i) to demonstrate how GHG accounting requirements drive estimates of biofuel CIs and (ii) to explore potential CI and financial implications of scenario-specific life cycle assessment (LCA). Results demonstrate GHG accounting using the CFR/LCFS can reasonably account for distinct levels of net electricity production by a biorefinery, but only the CFR yields similar CI sensitivity to spatially explicit factors (feedstock CI, grid electricity CI) as scenario-specific LCA: most GHG accounting frameworks do not capture CI variation across candidate sites in the United States. Ultimately, this work demonstrates the importance of LCA methodological specifications in low carbon fuel policies and tax credits.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Greenhouse Gas Accounting Procedures in Low Carbon Fuel Policies Overlook the Spatial Variability of Miscanthus-derived Sustainable Aviation Fuel

  ChemRxiv · 2025-04-28

  preprintOpen access

  Low carbon fuel policies such as the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), Canada Clean Fuel Regulations (CFR), and California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) as well as the 45Z tax credit are intended to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transportation. Cellulosic feedstocks, optimized biorefineries, and favorable farming locations can significantly reduce biofuel carbon intensity (CI). Despite the emergence of field-to-fuel GHG monitoring technologies that could verify such benefits, policy-specific requirements for CI accounting procedures may limit fuel producers’ ability to capitalize on these opportunities. This work examines a hypothetical biomass-to-sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) pathway using miscanthus and alcohol-to-jet (i) to demonstrate how GHG accounting requirements drive estimates of biofuel CIs and (ii) to explore potential CI and financial benefits of scenario-specific life cycle assessment (LCA). Results demonstrate that GHG accounting using the CFR and LCFS can reasonably account for distinct levels of net electricity production by a biorefinery, but only the CFR yields similar CI sensitivity to spatially explicit factors (feedstock CI, grid electricity CI) as scenario-specific LCA: most GHG accounting frameworks do not capture CI variation across candidate sites in the United States. Ultimately, this work demonstrates the importance of LCA methodological specifications in low carbon fuel policies and tax credits.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Greenhouse Gas Accounting Procedures in Low Carbon Fuel Policies Lead to Undervalued Benefits of Miscanthus-based Sustainable Aviation Fuel

  ChemRxiv · 2024-11-12

  preprintOpen access

  Low carbon fuel policies such as the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), Canada Clean Fuel Regulations (CFR), and California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) are intended to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transportation. Cellulosic feedstocks, optimized biorefineries, and favorable farming locations can significantly reduce biofuel carbon intensity (CI). Despite the emergence of field-to-fuel GHG monitoring technologies that could verify such benefits, programmatic constraints in CI accounting procedures may limit fuel producers’ ability to capitalize on these opportunities. To elucidate the implications of this challenge, this work examines a miscanthus-to-sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) pathway (i) to demonstrate how program provisions drive estimates of biofuel CIs and (ii) to explore potential CI and financial benefits of spatially explicit life cycle assessment (LCA). In comparing policy-based vs. spatially explicit CI scores (estimated via DayCent and BioSTEAM) for SAF production from miscanthus via alcohol-to-jet (ATJ), programmatic CI accounting requirements underestimated GHG benefits in 60-99% of simulated scenarios. These underestimates result in policy-induced SAF price differentials of -1.19 [(-)3.46 to (-)0.23], -0.07 [(-)1.06 to (+)0.37], and -0.48 [(-)2.46 to (+)0.16] $·L-1 for the RFS, CFR, and LCFS, respectively. Ultimately, this work demonstrates the importance of LCA methodological specifications in low carbon fuel policies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coping with the 2022 infant formula shortage

  Preventive Medicine Reports · 2023-01-30 · 27 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  To estimate the proportion of US consumers who sought formula during the shortage, what coping mechanisms they used, and public support for formula policies, we conducted an online survey of approximately 1,000 US consumers in August 2022 via Qualtrics. Approximately 35% of consumers attempted to purchase formula during the shortage, for their own household or on behalf of someone else, and the most common coping mechanisms were focused on searching different outlets (e.g., multiple stores, online). During the shortage public health agencies published recommendations for consumers - some were highly utilized (e.g., searching multiple stores), however, some were utilized less frequently (e.g., brand switching, breastfeeding). Additionally, despite warnings, some consumers still attempted to make their own formula. Understanding what coping mechanisms were and were not utilized, and their related risks has important implications for improving public health outreach in the future. Finally, we find considerable public support for regulation to ensure adequate supply of formula in the future, in particular regulation allowing imported formula and increased government involvement in the number of firms producing formula.

  PublisherDOI

• A scalable framework for quantifying field-level agricultural carbon outcomes

  Earth-Science Reviews · 2023-05-29 · 50 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evaluation of long-term impact of cereal rye as a winter cover crop in Illinois

  The Science of The Total Environment · 2023-03-20 · 7 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• A view of American farm policy in transition

  CABI Reviews · 2023-08-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Reauthorization of the Farm Bill is scheduled for 2023 and the agenda of the 118th Congress (2023–2024) elected in the 2022 midterms. The Farm Bill is the main legislative vehicle for American farm and food policy. The Farm Bill was last reauthorized by the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018, but the years since that time have featured four programs that made direct payments to farmers but were not authorized by Congress in the Farm Bill, commonly referred to as ad hoc assistance. In addition, the 117th Congress (2021–2022) enacted the Inflation Reduction Act which invested an additional US$18 billion into farm conservation programs over multiple years. This article reviews the ad hoc assistance and Inflation Reduction Act with comparisons to previous instances of ad hoc assistance, applying some lessons from history and seeking to gauge the extent to which the non-farm bill efforts provide leading indicators or signals about changes to, or a transition in, American farm policy.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gary Schnitkey

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  140 shared

• Nick Paulson

  122 shared

• Carl Zulauf

  121 shared

• Krista Swanson

  22 shared

• Kathy Baylis

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  17 shared

• Nicholas D. Paulson

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  15 shared

• Todd Kuethe

  12 shared

• Kaiyu Guan

  9 shared