Statistics demonstrate the diversity of EC agriculture. Agriculture in southern Europe is characterized by many small farms, most of which emphasize crop production. In northern Europe, farms are larger and more likely to emphasize livestock production. More than 70 percent of all EC farms are...

Antibiotics are used in fruit production to control fire blight, a bacterial disease of fruit trees that causes yield losses and eventually tree death. Fearing the development of widespread antibiotic resistance, scientists and public health officials are becoming increasingly concerned about...

Suppose a farmer had to apply a herbicide pre-emergence or not at all. The advent of a herbicide-tolerance trait innovation then provides the option to wait for more information before making a state-contingent post-emergence application. This option to wait can increase or decrease average...

The U.S. market in subsidized commodity revenue insurance contracts has expanded rapidly since 1996. By far the most prevalent contract forms are crop-specific, rather than the whole-farm design which has a better claim to being optimal. For an arbitrary acre allocation vector, this paper...

It appears to be widely believed that returns on low quality land are more variable than on high quality land. Using Ricardian rent as the measure of returns and sensitivity to output price as the measure of volatility, we investigate this null hypothesis for three different measures of quality....

Agricultural inputs can create negative externalities. For risk averting agents, risk will alter production decisions while the existence of institutions to insure against adverse states of nature will likely restore decisions toward levels under risk neutrality. In this paper, conditions are...

In recent years, commercial interest has been expressed in agricultural revenue insurance instruments. Participating parties may look to futures markets to offset assumed positions. In this note, conditions are identified such that revenue futures contracts are perfect substitutes for price...

Here we consider the hedging roles of a price futures contract versus a revenue futures contract. In the absence of idiosyncratic output risk, the revenue contract almost always dominates the price contract. Idiosyncratic output risk provides conditions under which the price contract should...

Corn markets are important for many industries, including the seed, fertilizer, meat production/processing, and agricultural machinery sectors, all of which are highly concentrated. Oligopoly theory suggests that corn input and field equipment suppliers likely benefit from policies that support...