The recent financial crisis has renewed interest in alternative asset classes such as farmland. Previous work has shown that farmland may provide expected return premiums while adding little additional risk to a diversified portfolio. However, these studies have been based on relatively short...

Agricultural conservation easements have been traditionally used to transfer or extinguish development rights on farm and ranch land in order to preserve open space and conservation and natural resources. These transfers are typically made with governmental agencies or Internal Revenue Service...

Farmers and other buyers and sellers of commodities use options in their marketing strategies. A cost of buying put and call options is the decay in option premium that occurs from the time an option position is established until the time the option position is closed out. This article finds...

Utilizing an input-output approach, this paper reports the local economic impacts from the expansion of an ethanol plant in Missouri. With the expansion ofthe U.S. ethanol industry in the form of both new and expandingplants both types of growth should be taken into account. This research...

An important component of the beef cow herd is the contribution of the dam to herd profitability. Yet, no research has contributed to valuing the dam’s genetic contribution to herd quality performance or profitability. This paper examines how managing for dam genetic pedigree quality...

Rural appraisers should be aware of the important contribution wildlife values and hunting leases make to forestland value. Many rural appraisals take place on small family holdings that constitute about 62 percent of private forestland in the United States. Roughly 12 percent of these small...

Winter wheat may be grown in the Southern Plains either to produce grain only, or as a dual-purpose crop to produce both fall-winter forage and grain. The objective of the research is to determine expected net returns for both production systems. The estimated expected net value of the...

Synchronized artificial insemination was used to inseminate cows using different types of sire genetics, including low-accuracy, calving-ease, and high-accuracy. These three sire groups were compared to calves born to cows bred using natural service. We found substantial production efficiency...

The “Green Industry†is a large and growing segment of production agriculture. As such, cost of production information is critical to successful management decision making. The research reported in this article estimated the cost of producing selected container-grown woody ornamental...