The Saskatchewan short-term hog loan program of 2002 provided a non-market credit line to participating hog producers. The repayment conditions for cash advances committed to by the provincial government depend on later hog prices, and so the program has derivative contract attributes. We model...

The feeder animal price is a derivative in the sense that its value depends upon the price of animals for the consumption market. It also depends upon the biological growth technology and feed costs. Daily maintenance costs are of particular interest to the husbander because they can be avoided...

We develop a dynamic capital valuation model in which each farm can take an action with farm-varying cost to increase the probability of not contracting a disease. In the presence of infection externalities, circumstances are identified under which multiple equilibria exist and where the one...

Farmed animal production has traditionally been a dispersed sector. Biosecurity actions relevant to eradicating infectious diseases are generally non-contractible, and might involve inordinately high transactions costs if they were contractible. If an endemic disease is to be eradicated within a...

Based on the Ricardian rent theory, this study employs the variable profit function to analyze the determinants of Iowa cropland cash rental rates using county-level panel data from 1987 to 2005. Accounting for spatial and temporal autocorrelations, responses of local cash rental rates to...

Iowa's farmland consists of over 16% hay crops and pastureland, a significant portion of which is under cash rental contracts. This study investigates the comparative relationships between cash rental rates for cropped land and non-cropped land, where the latter includes hay and pastureland. We...

After entering into farmland rental contracts in the fall, a tenant farmer has the planting flexibility to choose between corn and soybeans. Failure to account for this switching option will bias estimates of what farmers should pay to rent land. Applying contingent claims analysis methods, this...

Infectious livestock disease creates externalities for proximate animal production enterprises. The distribution of production scale within a region should influence and be influenced by these disease externalities. Taking the distribution of the unit costs of stocking an animal as primitive, we...

The industrialization of animal agriculture has fundamentally transformed animal health markets while animal health innovations have promoted this industrialization. The subtlety of these interactions shows how little we know about agricultural industrialization. To illustrate, we consider three...

The spatial dimension of agricultural production is important when a communicable disease enters a region. This paper considers two sorts of biosecurity risk that producers can seek to protect against. One concerns the risk of spread: that neighboring producers do not take due care in protecting...