STOCHASTIC EFFICIENCY ANALYSIS OF COMMUNITY-SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE CORE MANAGEMENT OPTIONS

The continued decline in both the number of and the acreage in small-scale farms and rural communities, as well as food safety and environmental concerns, has heightened interest in the community-supported agriculture (CSA) concept. Mean-variance, stochastic dominance, mean-Gini, and exponential utility/moment-generating function approaches to stochastic efficiency are employed to analyze three years of farm survey data on core management options for CSA farms. The core concept yields higher net income per acre than non-core management and, based on the stochastic efficiency analysis, should be regarded as the preferred management option for many CSA operators.