Federal actions could improve efficiency and competition in the market for farm loans by lowering barriers to market entry and reducing market segmentation. Such actions might include changes to existing charters of Government-sponsored enterprises (GSE's), regulatory reforms affecting...

This report provides a primer on the complex pricing system that has evolved in the United States to deal with milk production, its assembly (collection), and its distribution to alternative users. All the various government and private institutions making up the system are expected to work...

Many rural communities have benefited from the attraction of retirees in recent years. With the baby boom generation beginning to make retirement decisions, many other rural communities might consider economic development strategies based on attracting and retaining retirees. This report reviews...

Educating low-income women about the advantages of breastfeeding their babies increases the number who breastfeed. This report summarizes the results of four projects that focused primarily on promoting breastfeeding, which is considered to be the most healthful and beneficial feeding method for...

The purpose of this study is to better characterize factors associated with the likelihood of macronutrient excess or inadequacy among U.S adults by modeling parts of the conditional distribution of dietary intakes other than the conditional mean. The risk of dietary inadequacy or excess faced...

This bulletin provides an alternative approach for computing retail-farm price margins. Current published estimates of retail-farm price margins are calculated assuming that food markets are comprised of identical firms producing, in fixed-factor proportions, a homogeneous set of final food...

Consumers' willingness to pay for food products decreases when the food label indicates that a food product is produced with the aid of modern biotechnology. This bulletin presents empirical evidence on consumers' willingness to pay for biotech foods based on the presence or absence of labels...

This report expands aggregate lifecycle expenditure analysis by separating generational or cohort effects from aging effects. This is important since different generations or age groups may exhibit expenditure patterns that are the result of higher incomes and/or different tastes and...

USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) uses different economic models to estimate the impact of higher input prices on consumer food prices. The present study compares three ERS models. In the first two models, neither consumers nor food producers respond to market prices. We refer to these two...

The distribution of commodity-related payments and Federal crop insurance indemnities to U.S. farmers has shifted to larger farms as more and more U.S. agricultural production is done on those farms. Since the operators of larger farms tend to have higher household incomes than other farm...