Since 1990, the farmer cooperative landscape has experienced a significant structural shift. Steep consolidation, elevated competition, and surging commodity prices have elevated the need for co-ops to be mindful of their cost structure and efficiencies. To test for this structural shift, this...

Farm management skills can affect farm managers' performance. In this article, farm management performance is analyzed based on yearly Illinois Farm Business Farm Management (FBFM) panel data across 6,760 farms from 1996 through 2011. Two out-of-sample measures of skill are used to analyze the...

Using daily data from 182 spatially separated U.S. cash markets for the years 2006-2011, I investigate price discovery for corn. With a large number of cash markets available, I take into account explicitly the issue of market selection, which has been neglected in previous work. I find that...

This study investigates dynamic relationships among U.S. corn cash prices for the years 2006-2011. With daily data from 182 spatially separated markets spreading across 7 states, Iowa (IA), Illinois (IL), Indiana (IN), Ohio (OH), Minnesota (MN), Nebraska (NE), and Kansas (KS), we apply an error...

The expected net return to storage is conventionally calculated as the expected change in price over the storage period minus the cost of storage. However, this value is almost always negative, thus raising the question why would anyone store. Numerous explanations have been proposed, but none...

Many risk management strategies, including hedging the price risk using forward or futures contracts require accurate forecasts of basis, i.e., spot price minus the futures price. Recent literature in this area has applied nonlinear time-series models, which are refinements of the linear...

The objective was to compare the performance of farms that have more than one self-identified manager to the performance of similar farms with only one self-identified manager. The question to be answered is whether more managers enhance the performance of the farm. The technique used is a...