Originating from a bold idea, Organic Valley currently reigns as the largest organic cooperative in North America. In 1988, from the non-glaciated, hilly part of Southwestern Wisconsin, seven progressive rural entrepreneurs started a courageous and visionary journey. The founders’ original...

It is increasingly recognized that respondents use simple heuristics such as attribute non-attendance to make decisions in the discrete choice experiments. This paper use the latent class model to investigate different choice strategies and explore robust welfare estimates under varying...

Consumers are becoming increasingly interested in how their food is produced. Many studies have focused on consumers’ preferences and willingness-to-pay for specific production method claims; however, few studies have asked consumers to prioritize (rank) the importance of different production...

This research attempts to explain the boom and bust of corn ethanol plants in the mid-2000s by analyzing the following question: Did investors use a simple investment approach that suggested it was wise to invest, while more complex techniques would have shown to wait? To answer this, the...

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...

In this study, we explore how the acquisition of Smithfield, the world’s larger pork producer, by a Chinese firm Shuanghui, on Chinese consumers’ WTP to meat product using experimental auctions. We conducted two sets of experiments, one when the acquisition was still pending approval and the...

This paper examines the impact of technical efficiency on the optimal exit timing of farms in a stochastic dynamic framework. Starting from a standard real options approach, we incorporate technical efficiency via a production function and derive an optimal price trigger at which farms...