U.S. farm commodity support programs encompass nearly three quarters of a century and three quarters of a trillion taxpayer dollars. One dividend from that effort is to learn lessons. Farm commodity programs have steadfastly maintained a primary objective of supporting the incomes of a...

Purpose – Farm level data are essential to accurate setting of crop insurance premium rates, but their time series tends to be too short to allow them to be the sole data source. County level data are available in longer time series, however. The purpose of this paper is to present a...

Purpose – Farm level data are essential to accurate setting of crop insurance premium rates, but their time series tends to be too short to allow them to be the sole data source. County level data are available in longer time series, however. The purpose of this paper is to present a...

This study examines whether mean reversion is present in corn, soybean, wheat, live hog, and live cattle futures prices. Consistent with earlier studies, asymptotic regression results provide substantial evidence of mean reversion in commodity futures price movements. In sharp contrast, the...

Following enactment of the 1996 Farm Bill, corn and soybean implied volatilities covering the preharvest and storage seasons increased 16–23% between 1987–1995 and 1997–2001. The increase was statistically significant at the 90% confidence level. Standard deviation of corn and soybean...

Corn and soybean prices do not differ significantly among farms participating in the Illinois farm business farm management (FBFM) program from 1996 through 2005. While consistent with the literature, the finding is inconsistent with farmers' opinion of the importance of price. A conundrum...