This paper develops and applies a methodology to assess the accuracy of historical loss-cost rating procedures, similar to those used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency (RMA), versus alternative parametric premium estimation methods. It finds that the accuracy...

Obtaining reliable estimates of insurance premiums is a critical step in risk sharing and risk transfer necessary to ensure solvency and continuity in crop insurance programs. Challenges encountered in the estimation include dealing with aggregation bias from using county level yield averages as...

Evaluations of the factors influencing the adoption of agricultural and natural resource management technologies among small farmers in developing countries have been mostly limited to qualitative discussions or simple descriptive statistics resulting in superficial and inconclusive findings....

Capital budgeting decisions faced by tart cherry producers often challenge our traditional valuation techniques. Real Options Valuation (ROV) methods may be useful but assumptions of existing ROV approaches are restrictive and, in some cases, unrealistic. In this paper we assert that use of...

The 2002 Farm Act allowed farm owners to update base acres for direct payments (DPs) and counter-cyclical payments (CCPs) and to update yields for counter-cyclical payments. A minority, about 40 percent, of the 1.9 million enrolled farms choose to update their base acres using 1998-2001...

The impact of new manure management regulations depends on the willingness of crop producers to accept manure. A contingent valuation analysis of crop producers was used to estimate the willingness of crop producers to accept or pay for manure. Results indicate that producers will pay a positive...

A translog stochastic cost frontier is estimated to calculate cost efficiency index (CEI) of 203 Kenyan and Ugandan maize producers using survey data from 2003. Results show a mean CEI of 1.95, with greater inefficiency among farms in Kenya of medium-large size. Key sources of inefficiency are...

A regression model was used to investigate the determinants of soil nutrient depletion in Uganda. The major determinants of soil nutrient balances are household endowments, access to markets, and extension services, non-farm activities and agricultural potential. The results suggest the need to...