Future contracts for fluid milk began trading in late 1995 and early 1996. This paper investigates the potential use of fluid milk futures contracts as hedge vehicles for dairy producers in the Upper Midwest and California markets. This is done by developing simulated futures prices for the...

Over the last 20 years the cheese manufacturing sector has become the most important market for U.S. farm milk. Using a plant-level dataset encompassing the 1972-1997 period we examine the production characteristics of this industry. Using the results obtained from our cost function we estimate...

Increased availability of scanner-based panel data has enabled researchers to better understand nondurable commodity purchase dynamics. In this study, we focus on one component of the purchase process--when to buy. The relationship between the discrete purchase decision and a set of household...

Livestock Gross Margin insurance for dairy cattle (LGM-Dairy) is a risk management tool that can be used to insure a lower bound on a dairy producer’s gross margin. In this paper we (1) review the basic structure of LGM-Dairy (2) examine the sensitivity of Gross Margin Guarantee (GMG) and...