Malt barley is an important specialty crop in the Northern Plains and growers mitigate risk with federally subsidized crop insurance and production contracts. However, growers face considerable risk due to "coverage gaps" in crop insurance that result in uncertain indemnity payments due to...

Optimal hedging strategies are analyzed for a cooperative operating a price pooling system in the presence of price and quantity risk. A three-period model, accounting for default risk and storage, is developed. Hedging allows the cooperative to increase the pool price offered to farmers by 2.8...

StarLink corn, a biotech variety not approved for human food use, disrupted the marketing system in 2000 because of inadvertent commingling. Testing protocols have since been established for detection of StarLink in corn shipments to Japan. Domestic food manufacturers, anxious to avoid risks of...

This study focuses on the economics of segregating U.S. non-biotech corn and soybeans for shipments to Japan, the primary export market for U.S. non-biotech grains and oilseeds, as a case study. The purposes of this paper are two-fold: 1) to estimate price premiums that buyers in both the U.S....

The paper analyzes the role of counter-cyclical (CC) payments in stabilizing farm incomes and investigates whether the payments could affect farmers planting decisions. Our analysis, based on representative farmer approach, finds that CC payments provide a relatively modest enhancement to farm...

This article estimates factors that impact location decisions by new ethanol plants using logistic regression analysis and spatial correlation techniques. The results indicate that location decisions are impacted by the agricultural characteristics of a county, competition, and state-level...