The Agricultural Risk Protection Act of 2000 recognized organic farming as a“good farming practice,†making federal crop insurance coverage available for organiccrops, and taking into account the idiosyncrasies of the organic production system. Inaddition to the production risks...

This paper examines methods frequently used by agricultural economists to measure the cost of farm labor, including operator and other unpaid, and to provide insights for improving them. The tradition is broken of treating labor and management separately, and labor is defined as encompassing all...

The cost structure of pork slaughter and processing plants and firms has significant behavioral and competitive implications. A survey of selected large slaughter and processing firms probed into fixed and variable costs for single and double shift plants, and capacity utilization and multiplant...

The paper examines changes in employment and wage patterns, industrial restructuring, and foreign competition that affect opportunities of recent immigrants to the non-metropolitan Midwest, especially to Iowa. The focus is on food and kindred products where meat and poultry packing and...

We introduce an easily implemented and flexible calibration technique for partial demand systems, combining recent developments in incomplete demand systems and a set of restrictions conditioned on the available elasticity estimates. The technique accommodates various degrees of knowledge on...

We analyze the effects of a domestic standard that reduces an externality associated with the consumption of the good targeted by the standard, using a model in which foreign and domestic producers compete in the domestic good market. Producers can reduce expected damage associated with the...

Major issues and challenges encountered in modeling and analyzing agricultural and trade policy reforms are reviewed. We focus on the modeling approach and pay special attention to the type and scope of the models, the calibration of a realistic baseline scenario, the representation of the...

WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, is a widely studied public food assistance program that aims to provide foods, nutrition education and other services to at-risk, low-income children and pregnant, breastfeeding and postpartum women. From a policy...