This report contains the major findings from a survey of South Dakota CRP contract holders which is a major component of an SDSU research project on the ?Impact of CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) Acres in South Dakota Being Put Back Into Production.? The major objectives of the research are:...

U.S. farm legislation is due to be updated in 2007, to become effective with the 2008 crop year. Major questions surround the role of environmental or conservation provisions in the new Federal farm bill. In this paper, I first present some background on the evolution of U.S....

We propose a fear index for corn using the variance swap rate synthesized from out-of-the-money call and put options as a measure of implied variance. Previous studies estimate implied variance based on Black (1976) model or forecast variance using the GARCH models. Our implied variance...

South Dakota has recently experienced a significant increase in the proportion of acres treated with insecticide. Unfortunately, data on insecticide usage by crop at the county level is not available. The following case study seeks to uncover the reasons for this increase by analyzing...

Using responses from a mail survey conducted among 203 South Dakota grain elevator managers in 2002, we analyzed the degree to which their elevators were prepared to segregate non-transgenic from commodity grains. Results showed four percent of the managers expected their own, and ten percent...

Beef industry data suggest that carcass yield and quality grades have shown little improvement over the last six years. Trend analysis of grid market share and carcass quality suggests that grid pricing has not made sufficient progress in achieving the goals envisioned for it as a value based...

As part of the sustainable agriculture research program in the Economics Department at South Dakota State University (SDSU), ‘organic’ and ‘conventional’ crop prices have been compared for nearly a decade. This pamphlet serves as an update of price comparisons through 2003 and a final...

The ability of the former federal voluntary price reporting system to facilitate market efficiency in the cash markets for U.S. livestock was questioned by producer groups and academic researchers prior to implementation of federal mandatory price reporting regulations. In the cash market for...

The information value of the former USDA voluntary price reporting system is investigated for dressed weight slaughter steers. The ability of the former system to promote market transparency and price discovery in the cash market is evaluated with state level mandatory price reporting data...