Participants in U.S. markets for live cattle increasingly rely on federal grading standards to price slaughtered animals. This change is due to the growing prominence of "grid" pricing mechanisms that specify explicit premiums and discounts contingent on an animal's graded quality class....

In modern U.S. agriculture, a tenant typically contracts with more than one landlord, although most of the past literature has focused exclusively on bilateral contracts with a single tenant and a single landlord. We argue that, in the presence of contractual externalities under which the...

As with other technologies, adoption of Bt seed requires technology specific knowledge. Growing secondary pest populations have slowly eroded the benefits of Bt technology in China. We illustrate the effects of introducing Bt technology among farmers with an imperfect knowledge of secondary pest...

Soybean production in the South has evolved over recent years from conventional soybean production systems (CSPS) in which soybeans are planted after May 1st to early soybean production systems (ESPS) in which soybeans are planted as early as mid-March. The shift was aided by the advent of...

The purpose of this paper is to model the manure management policy implemented in the European Union, and more specifically the limit imposed on the spreading of organic nitrogen. A theoretical model is defined in such a way that a number of specificities concerning livestock production can be...

This research evaluates the impact of using different starting conditions in estimating meat demand systems. Results suggest that as the econometric task becomes increasingly nonlinear, specification of starting conditions becomes increasingly important. This work demonstrates implications of...

System of input demand functions is estimated to examine the impact of farm program payments on farm economic structure. Influence of farm program payments on input resource use for the time periods corresponding to the thirteen farm bills in effect since 1938 is also examined. Empirical...

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 includes a provision designed to double the production and use of ethanol in fuels by 2012, and that beginning in 2013, a minimum of 250 million gallons per year of ethanol be produced from lignocellulosic sources such as corn stover, wheat straw, and switchgrass....