Insect infestation during storage and processing causes millions of dollars of wheat damage annually in the United States. Insect infestation reduces wheat storing processing profit as well as consumer confidence in wheat food products. Meanwhile, increased concerns about insecticide use have...

The purpose of this paper is to determine the importance of the strength and weakness of basis and futures prices as barometers for producers to use in deciding whether to store or not. Basis is the single most important market signal for wheat producers to use when deciding whether to store or...

Buyer complaints about poor quality U.S. wheat have led to proposals to enforce minimum dockage standards for exports. An economic-engineering approach is used to evaluate costs and benefits of cleaning wheat in order to meet these standards for 13 possible cleaning configurations. These results...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/20/04.

Years of research have been dedicated to determining the best time for producers to sell their commodities. Researchers have developed basis models, market efficiency tests, hedging/risk models, price forecasting models, and many other models in an attempt to help producers. There is a vast...

Aggregate data are commonly used to determine returns to storage. However, recent studies have shown that aggregating data may lead to underestimated returns. This article compares aggregate and elevator data from Oklahoma to determine if aggregate data underestimate returns. We find no...

There has been considerable normative research about how farmers should make marketing decisions, but little positive research on what farmers really do. Regressions of gender, total volume, timing, and frequency of sales on the average weighted price received are used to test hypotheses...

Behavioral finance is a relatively new field of inquiry that may help better understand farmer marketing. The theory argues that people tend to make certain psychological biases that cause them to not be fully rational in an economic sense. For example, people tend to be about twice as upset...

While considerable research has estimated liquidity costs of futures trading, little comparable research is available about options markets. This study determines effective bid-ask spreads in options and futures markets for Kansas City Board of Trade (KCBT) wheat. Effective bid-ask spreads are...

The major finding is that liquidity costs in futures options market are two to three times higher than liquidity costs in the futures market. Liquidity cost is one potential factor to consider when choosing between hedging with a futures contract or with an option contract. While there is...