About

Zachary Brown, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at NC State University. He is also a faculty member of the Genetic Engineering & Society Center and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Environmental and Resource Policy. Dr. Brown earned his Ph.D. in Environmental and Resource Economics from Duke University in 2011 and his B.A. in Mathematics-Economics from Lawrence University in 2005. His research and teaching broadly focus on bioeconomics, analyzing the dynamic interactions between human behavior and complex environmental and ecological systems through experimental methods, observational data, mathematical models, and theory. His work includes researching the effects of economic incentives and policies for managing pesticide resistance in agricultural systems, public perceptions and consumer willingness to pay for food products utilizing new genetic engineering technologies, the economics of controlling vector-borne diseases such as malaria, and economic evaluations of household cookstoves aimed at reducing air pollution and deforestation.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Agronomy
• Biology
• Waste management
• Mathematics
• Microeconomics
• Chemistry
• Horticulture
• Economics
• Environmental science
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• Dynamically optimal cover crop adoption

  European Review of Agricultural Economics · 2025-04-29 · 2 citations

  article

  Abstract This paper develops a stochastic dynamic programming model to investigate optimal cover crop adoption policies, accounting for cumulative effects on soil fertility, uncertain future fertilizer and output prices, irreversibility of sunk machinery costs and flexibility in the timing of adoption over time. Based on data from a 35-year cotton field experiment in West Tennessee (1984–2018), we first estimate the static and dynamic yield effects of cover crop adoption and then use these estimates to evaluate the decision of a representative cotton farmer to adopt three cover cropping practices—hairy vetch, winter wheat and crimson clover—under conventional till and no-till production systems. Econometric estimates imply significant cumulative effects of cover crops on yields, as well as static and dynamic substitution effects between cover crops and nitrogen fertilizer inputs. With these substitution effects implying increasing marginal profit from soil fertility, our analysis suggests a threshold level of soil fertility level, above which it is optimal to adopt cover crops and below which it is not. Adoption of cover crops is more favored if no-till practices have been implemented. Moreover, in the presence of sunk costs that have not yet been incurred, the optimal strategy is to postpone the adoption of cover crops in both conventional till and no-till fields until crop prices improve, the cost of adoption decreases, or fertilizer prices increase. Our results also indicate that when fertilizer prices are higher, cover crop adoption in no-till systems can lead to substantial fertilizer cost savings, with the amount of those fertilizer cost savings increasing over time as soil health further improves.

  PublisherDOI

• Socioeconomic predictors of knockdown resistance in <i>Aedes albopictus</i> (Diptera: Culicidae)

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-07-05 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Knockdown resistance ( kdr ) in the mosquito Aedes albopictus (Skuse) jeopardizes the effectiveness of insecticidal control. This is a pressing issue given the expanding range of the species and its role as vector to harmful viruses. Effectively preventing the emergence of resistance or removing the conditions that positively select for kdr mutations requires us first to understand how these conditions arise. Here, we investigate the association between wealth and the frequency of kdr in Ae. albopictus populations in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. We hypothesized that kdr frequency correlates with wealth, measured by total property value. We speculate that wealthier neighborhoods apply chemical insecticides more frequently, leading to higher kdr frequencies. We tested this hypothesis by sampling mosquito populations from 31 different residential blocks across the city and along a property value gradient. We found a high frequency of 39.0% for mutations at locus F1534S of the voltage-gated sodium channel gene ( vgsc ). Kdr mutations were found at 84% of the blocks we sampled. Our statistical analysis indicates strong evidence for an association between wealth and F1534S frequency. We discuss these and other findings, and what this means for suburban mosquito control going forward.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Preparing for Deployment

  2025-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Assessing market failures driving pesticide resistance

  Science · 2025-02-27 · 3 citations

  letter1st authorCorresponding

  Some US farms' use of transgenic Bt corn raises questions.

  PublisherDOI

• Social Learning in Subsidized Pilot Programs for New Technologies: Dynamic Effects on Demand and Cost-Effectiveness

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Applications, Benefits, and Challenges of Genome Edited Crops

  2024-03-20 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The tools of genome editing were described more than a decade ago as promising ways to accelerate crop improvement, as well as for applications in human and animal health. Now, a decade later, we are seeing applications of genome editing across a range of crops and trait combinations that will benefit producers and consumers. Countries around the world are actively updating regulatory frameworks to adequately govern this new technology. In this paper, we describe recent advances in genome editing tools, review select applications underway, consider the benefits of the technology, and offer a perspective on significant challenges to the successful use of genome editing. Given an enabling policy environment, genome editing will be an important tool for creating a competitive bioeconomy while addressing major challenges in agriculture and for consumers. We offer five recommendations to ensure genome editing in agriculture benefits society.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Topological singularity-induced Mott-like self-energy and its impact on Kondo cloud formation

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-03-18

  preprintOpen access

  We discovered that abnormal Mott physics can emerge even in weakly correlated 4f fermions through their interplay with topological singularity. Employing ab initio many-body perturbation theory combined with dynamical mean field theory, we show that 4f electrons near the topological singular point experience strong effective Coulomb repulsion, as the hybridization channels are blocked near the singularity. As a result, Mott-like self-energy emerges, forbidding the coexistence of 4f quasiparticles and the topological singularity at the same energy level in HoPtBi, PrPtBi, and PrAlGe. The formation of 4f quasiparticles is highly dependent on the energy of topological singularity relative to the Fermi level. This effect is suggested to be responsible for the selective quantum phenomena observed between heavy fermion behavior from Kondo resonance and anomalous transport from nontrivial topological states.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Developing practical measures of the price of pesticide resistance: A flexible computational framework with global sensitivity analysis

  Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association · 2024-02-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract Pesticide resistance poses an increasing challenge for agricultural sustainability. Pesticide susceptibility is a depletable biological resource, but resistance management rarely quantifies marginal, forward‐looking economic costs to users of depletion. To facilitate the development of such costs, we use a generic stochastic bioeconomic model of resistance evolution in a crop pest population, stochastic dynamic programming, and global sensitivity analysis to analyze the “marginal user costs” of resistance. The most impactful parameters are population density dependence and pesticide prices. The least impactful is the fitness cost of resistance, which is noteworthy because of prior emphasis on this parameter in the resistance management literature.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Economic optimization of <i>Wolbachia</i> ‐infected <i>Aedes aegypti</i> release to prevent dengue

  Pest Management Science · 2024-03-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: Dengue virus, primarily transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, is a major public health concern affecting ≈3.83 billion people worldwide. Recent releases of Wolbachia-transinfected Ae. aegypti in several cities worldwide have shown that it can reduce dengue transmission. However, these releases are costly, and, to date, no framework has been proposed for determining economically optimal release strategies that account for both costs associated with disease risk and releases. RESULTS: We present a flexible stochastic dynamic programming framework for determining optimal release schedules for Wolbachia-transinfected mosquitoes that balances the cost of dengue infection with the costs of rearing and releasing transinfected mosquitoes. Using an ordinary differential equation model of Wolbachia and dengue in a hypothetical city loosely describing areas at risk of new dengue epidemics, we determined that an all-or-nothing release strategy that quickly brings Wolbachia to fixation is often the optimal solution. Based on this, we examined the optimal facility size, finding that it was inelastic with respect to the mosquito population size, with a 100% increase in population size resulting in a 50-67% increase in optimal facility size. Furthermore, we found that these results are robust to mosquito life-history parameters and are mostly determined by the mosquito population size and the fitness costs associated with Wolbachia. CONCLUSIONS: These results reinforce that Wolbachia-transinfected mosquitoes can reduce the cost of dengue epidemics. Furthermore, they emphasize the importance of determining the size of the target population and fitness costs associated with Wolbachia before releases occur. © 2024 The Authors. Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Food for thought: Assessing the consumer welfare impacts of deploying irreversible, landscape-scale biotechnologies

  Food Policy · 2023-10-12 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Genetically engineered insects have gained attention as regionally deployed pest control technologies, with substantial applications in agriculture for combatting intractable crop pests and diseases. One potential tool is a ‘gene drive’, using CRISPR-based gene editing. In gene drive, preferentially inherited, engineered traits are spread throughout a geographic area to reduce pest populations or inhibit disease transmission, while also potentially reducing pesticide use and crop prices. But the self-perpetuating nature of gene drives presents a consequence, in that consumers could eventually be limited to only host crops grown in the presence of these genetically engineered insects. In this study, we analyze potential consumer welfare impacts of these technologies using discrete choice experiment data from a representative sample of U.S. adults, examining preferences regarding gene drive use to control spotted wing drosophila in blueberries and Asian citrus psyllid in orange juice (OJ) production. We find smaller average discounts for gene drives versus increased conventional pesticide use or genetically modified crops. Only 27% and 25% of blueberry and OJ consumers, respectively, are estimated to derive disutility from gene drives. However, gene drive disutility for these consumers is so large that elimination of non-drive options from their choice sets results in negative (blueberries) or neutral (OJ) effects to aggregate consumer welfare when weighed against gains to other consumers from reduced prices. Positive welfare effects are recovered by retaining availability of non-gene-drive products. We argue that this type of analysis will be increasingly important as landscape-level biotechnologies are deployed to address challenges to agricultural sustainability.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: PRICES, PEERS, AND PERCEPTIONS: FIELD EXPERIMENTS ON TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION IN THE CONTEXT OF IMPROVED COOKSTOVES

  NSF · $99k · 2015–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Kostas Orginos

  William & Mary

  24 shared

• Stefan Meinel

  University of Arizona

  17 shared

• Katherine L. Dickinson

  14 shared

• Randall A. Kramer

  Duke University

  11 shared

• Marc F. Bellemare

  9 shared

• Michael S. Jones

  University of Alaska Anchorage

  8 shared

• William Detmold

  8 shared

• Roderick M. Rejesus

  North Carolina State University

  7 shared