Increasing volatility in milk and feed prices has led to higher levels of market and financial risk for dairy farmers. We examine dairy farmer use of forward pricing methods for milk sales and feed purchases. Operators with larger herds, higher levels of education, and those farm businesses that...

Nutrient management and air emissions continue to be an area of increased management control on all livestock operations as environmental regulations become more stringent. Agricultural producers must consider uncertainty surrounding the timing of and potential increases of environmental policy...

Livestock rations are formulated to minimize feed cost subject to nutritional requirements for a target performance level, which ignores the potentially substantial cost of disposing of nutrients fed in excess of nutritional requirements. We incorporate nutrient disposal costs into a modified...

The current method to derive livestock diets is to optimize cost performance subject to animal performance and resulting nutritional requirements via a linear programming model. In contrast, we examine the livestock diet formulation problem as a multi-criteria decision model with the criteria...