The introduction of vertical coordination in the hog industry has provided producers with new business arrangements for raising hogs. While some researchers have elicited utility functions for hog producers on the basis of income risk, none have addressed autonomy, a factor which appears to be...

Farm Family Adjustments to Financial Stress

The changing economic conditions over the past century, along with changes in technology and developments in economic theory and quantitative methods, helped shape the profession we currently refer to as agricultural and applied economics. The broadening of the profession from the original focus...

Costs and returns of pasture-based dairy production are compared with those of conventional production using matching samples. Both whole-farm and dairy enterprise-level estimates are made using the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Resource Management Survey data....

This article examines the rate of adoption of four computerized technologies in U.S. dairy production: an on-farm computer to manage dairy records, accessing the internet for dairy information, computerized milking systems and computerized feed delivery systems. Data from the USDA-Agricultural...

Louisiana farmers were surveyed to determine their adoption of information and record-keeping technologies, including the Internet, Dairy Herd Improvement Association membership, use of financial measures, and frequency of use of computerized records. Factors influencing adoption included having...

Technical efficiency, scale and scope economies, marginal productive contributions for inputs and outputs, and efficiency drivers were determined for the Southeastern U.S meat goat enterprise. The average technical efficiency was 0.88. We find increasing returns to scale and scope economies for...