This chapter assesses the political economy of the 2014 farm bill, which eliminated annual fixed direct payments but offers enhanced downside risk protection against low prices or declining revenue. The farm bill secured substantial bipartisan majorities in a politically contentious Congress....

This paper summarizes the evolutionary trends in US farm policy that have culminated in the 2014 farm bill, describes the new farm bill programs in depth, and highlights the key policy issues that arise and will play out over its planned five-year duration. This new US farm bill eliminates fixed...

The expected net return to storage is conventionally calculated as the expected change in price over the storage period minus the cost of storage. However, this value is almost always negative, thus raising the question why would anyone store. Numerous explanations have been proposed, but none...

Purpose – Farm level data are essential to accurate setting of crop insurance premium rates, but their time series tends to be too short to allow them to be the sole data source. County level data are available in longer time series, however. The purpose of this paper is to present a...

Ohio farm operators were surveyed about the proportion of selected agricultural services provided by them for their operations and the income earned from providing these services for others. The survey respondents provided more than half their tillage, crop harvesting, crop and livestock...

Trends in farm machinery use suggest the US farm machinery market is a replacement market. Moreover, since 1960, the price of machinery has risen relative to prices for other production inputs. Econometric analysis suggests that higher relative machinery prices encourage input substitution....