In addition to horizontal consolidation at the input, production, and processing subsectors, the US pork industry is becoming more vertically aligned. The largest hog producers and pork processors were surveyed regarding their involvement in vertical coordination arrangements and their plans for...

Changes among agricultural input industries have important implications for US agriculture. Reasons for these changes have included the globalization of the marketplace, technological advances, and a changing farm sector. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

A controversial topic in US courts has been the tax treatment of purchased intangible assets, which affects the market value of many agribusinesses. The Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that intangible assets, such as sales forces, customer lists, patents, etc., were depreciable if there were...

Exporting high-valued products in general, and meat and meat products in particular, has not been a marketing alternative explored by many purveyors of such products, A series of interviews with executives of successful meat exporting firms was conducted to determine alternative successful...

Soybean futures spreads in the 1948-1997 period are evaluated for the associated monetary risks inherent in multiyear hedge-to-arrive contracts (HTAs). For all years, the probability of having a negative old crop-new crop spread is approximately 75%. However, the high-price years have a 100%...

This study examines possible causes for the poor performance that has characterized the forward pricing and hedging practices used by participants in meat processing and merchandising operations. Alternative methods of managing price risk or meat merchandisers are presented and evaluated. The...

Options on cattle futures have expanded the realm of alternative marketing strategies available to cattle feeders. This study utilized actual feedlot data to compare the return distributions from 31 separate fed cattle marketing strategies using cash, futures, put option, and call option...

Agricultural cooperatives have undergone significant consolidation in recent years. Identifying firms with a potential to improve performance via merging requires an examination of financial performance of those firms relative to firms of similar and larger sizes. This study develops a set of...

Cattle on Feed (COF) reports are the most important source of cattle supply information for the beef industry. Accuracy of these reports is critical, as they have marked impacts on current and expected fed cattle market prices and influence resource allocation decisions. This study investigates...

Live hog prices must reflect end-use pork value to efficiently convey market information from consumers to producers. Precise end-use value is excessively costly to trace for each carcass given current technology. As such, pricing structures must be based upon carcass merit information that is...