The US dairy sector is facing structural changes including a geographical shift in dairy production and a tendency towards the implementation of more intensive production systems. These changes might significantly affect farm efficiency, profitability and the long-term economic sustainability of...

Small and limited resource farmers and landowners in the Alabama Black Belt region face many challenges as they seek to make their farms and forestlands profitable, productive and environmentally sustainable. A host of problems—farmland conversion, urbanization pressures, reductions in water...

This study determines efficiency drivers, scale and technical efficiencies, and other economic performance measures for Southeastern U.S. meat goat farms. We estimate an input distance function (IDF) using stochastic production frontier (SPF) techniques. Empirical Monte Carlo (MC) simulation...

This study determines the factors leading to adoption of split-sex and phase feeding by U.S. hog producers and consequently the impact of adoption on operation’s input cost performance. A sample selection model is employed to account for unobservable variables possibly being correlated with...

A method is developed to integrate the efficiency concepts of technical, allocative, and scale inefficiencies (TI, AI, SI) into the variable returns to scale (VRS) frontier approximation in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The proposed weighted DEA (WDEA) approach takes a weighted average of the...

The US dairy industry has experienced significant structural changes in the last few decades. Dairy production has been consolidated into fewer but larger farms, and shifting toward Western and Southern states from traditional dairy regions including the Lake States and Corn Belt. The changes...