In processing industries, plant location decisions are costly and have consequences for firm profitability. When raw materials are heavy or perishable, transportation costs limit shipping distances and processors must compete locally for raw material inputs. To determine the likely profitability...

Conventional wisdom holds that a small and decreasing number of hog slaughter firms are using their "market power" to take advantage of U.S. hog producers. Existing studies have simply calculated industry concentration ratios and assumed/asserted that the performance of such a concentrated...

This paper documents the extent of cooperative penetration into branded dairy product markets and presents case study evidence on competitive strategies in the skim/low fat milk, whole milk, cottage cheese, butter, margarine, and ice cream markets. We employ data for 51 local market areas from...

We find sale prices and net revenues received by sellers in the Midwestern club pig market are higher at traditional face-to-face auctions than at comparable Internet auctions. The comparison overcomes adverse selection issues that commonly plague such analyses by using data from sellers that...

A changing world of increasing complexity, fluctuating prices, high energy costs and limited data necessitate creative blending of economic theory and available empirical statistics to understand the welfare impacts in a specific market. In this paper, a programming approach is used in tandem...

The increasing use of production contracts in the hog sector has reduced the number of spot market transactions, raised concerns about price manipulation and helped to spur legislation requiring price reporting by packers. Using data from the 2002 and 2007 Censuses of Agriculture, this study...

In recent decades there has been a substantial increase in the scale of production and the use of production contracts in the hog sector. This paper explores empirically whether these two phenomena are related by examining whether the use of production contracts has allowed finish hog operations...

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In recent decades the northwestern part of Germany (Weser-Ems region) has come to focus on intensive pork production. This has led to public outrage about the disposal of biological waste, farmers’ complaints about the high cost of leasing land, soaring risks of animal diseases, and the...