The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 (2002 Farm Act) introduced counter-cyclical payments (CCPs) to the array of income-support programs for agricultural commodities in the United States. CCPs are available for specified crops when market prices are below levels set forth in the legislation. As such, these payments can reduce price-related revenue risks faced by farmers, which may influence agricultural production decisions. Several mitigating factors, however, suggest that overall production effects of CCPs through revenue risk reduction are likely to be limited.

The popular saying that a picture is worth a thousand words may be misleading when the media displays widely accessible aerial photographs of the world's surface to formulate conclusions about interregional land use and resource policy differences. This paper shows that "ground truthing" is essential to avoid small sample bias from selected images.