The objective of this study was to identify factors that contribute to returns to operators’ labor and management of dairy farms in the U.S. Particular attention is given to the role of education and extension. Operators’ labor and management income (OLMI) is used as a measure of financial...

The detection of enteric viruses accompanied by a characterization of the viruses found in a given environmental matrix may inform about the sources of fecal contamination. In the present work, 55 water samples and 20 sediment samples were collected from 21 small farms in southern Brazil....

While anaerobic digester systems (ADS) have been increasingly adopted by large dairy farms to generate marketable energy products, like electricity, from animal manure, there is a growing need for assessing the feasibility of regional ADS for multiple farms that are not large enough to...

The purpose of this study is to examine the profile of dairy farms according to their reproduction management practices. Using established methodological tools on data from an extensive survey of 123 dairy farms the analysis yields five alternative profiles. It appears that artificial...

This paper introduces a stochastic frontier production model which accommodates firm-specific temporal variation in technical inefficiency. Unlike Cornwell, Schmidt and Sickles (1990), technical inefficiency is not modeled through the intercept of the production frontier, but through an error...

In a recent paper Bogetoft and Hougaard (1999) suggest the use of a new potential improvements approach to efficiency evaluation which has the advantage of separating the issue of benchmark selection from the issue of efficiency measurement. In the present paper the potential improvements...

In this paper, we evaluate the potential of life cycle assessment (LCA) to support environmental decision making at commercial dairy farms. To achieve this, we follow a four-step method that allows converting environmental assessment results using LCA into case-specific advice for farmers. This...

Prince Edward Island (PEI) is the smallest province in Canada measuring about 5700 km2 in area with a population of around 130,000 people. Small family farm operation is part of the Island's way of life. However, the dairy industry in North America is undergoing significant structural change....

The aim is to introduce a new econometric methodology for multi-output production frontiers. In the context of a system of frontier equations, a flexible multivariate distribution for the inefficiency error term is used. This multivariate distribution is constructed through a copula function...