This paper examines methods frequently used by agricultural economists to measure the cost of farm labor, including operator and other unpaid, and to provide insights for improving them. The tradition is broken of treating labor and management separately, and labor is defined as encompassing all...

The cost structure of pork slaughter and processing plants and firms has significant behavioral and competitive implications. A survey of selected large slaughter and processing firms probed into fixed and variable costs for single and double shift plants, and capacity utilization and multiplant...

The paper examines changes in employment and wage patterns, industrial restructuring, and foreign competition that affect opportunities of recent immigrants to the non-metropolitan Midwest, especially to Iowa. The focus is on food and kindred products where meat and poultry packing and...

The paper presents an econometric model of dynamic agricultural input demand functions that includes research based technical change and autoregressive disturbances and fits the model to data for a set of state aggregates pooled over 1950-82. The methodological approach is one of developing a...

Pork production has been evolving from relatively small, family- run operations toward large-scale operations with several employees. This study uses a national survey of pork producers and their employees to answer several questions about the structure of wages and benefits in this rapidly...

This paper evaluates the results of a survey of Iowa pork producers, examining potential price discrimination by packers. Prices varied greatly across producers, and the examined variables explain just over half of the variation. Factors under the producer's control were the most significant...

The rapid expansion of large-scale pork production has been accompanied by increasing concerns regarding potential detrimental consequences of environmental hazards on the health of producers. This study makes use of health indicators obtained from attendees at the World Pork Expo between 1991...

This paper examines efficiency implications of national and local policies for fund allocation and management of agricultural research, which produce pure and impure public goods. The possibility is examined that competitive grants programs increase rent seeking activities by scientists relative...

Sera from hogs were analyzed using the modified direct agglutination test (MAT). Serum samples were collected from sows which were part of the National Animal Health Monitoring System (NAHMS) swine survey. The blood sera on file represented 394 randomly selected hog farms throughout the United...

This paper develops an approach to decompose farmland price time series into three components: permanent fundamental component, temporary fundamental component, and nonfundamental component. This decomposition is useful for studying the importance of fundamental versus nonfundamental factors in...