This paper summarizes the results of a survey of a stratified, random sample of 630 hog operations in Indiana and Nebraska. The survey was conducted in March and April, 2000 with support of a research grant to contribute to the development of a knowledge base to guide the design and...

A variety of crop revenue insurance programs have recently been introduced. A critical component of revenue insurance contracts is quantifying the risk associated with stochastic prices. Forward-looking, market-based measures of price risk which are often available in form of options premia are...

Changes in the risk environment and tools available to manage risk have resulted in an increased need for risk management skills among farmers and ranchers. In response the USDA initiated a risk management education competitive grants program in the spring of 1998. This is the first report from...

Agricultural economists have for many decades concerned ourselves with gaining an understanding of individual behavior when confronted with risk, and developing tools to address decision-making under risk. This area of research has recently gained renewed attention for a variety of reasons. This...

Revenue insurance with shallow loss protection for farmers has been introduced recently. A common attribute of most shallow loss proposals is that they would be area-revenue triggered. The impact on optimal hedge ratios of combining these shallow loss insurance proposals with deep loss...

Introduction: The context of row crop risk management continues to grow more complex. While the magnitude of price and yield risk changes over time, the development of sophisticated risk management tools and complex government policies may improve growers’ ability to manage risk -- if these...

Crop revenue insurance offers farmers a way to manage revenue variability that results from yield and price risks. Commodity-level revenue insurance, particularly for corn, soybeans, and wheat, has become a major part of the subsidized Federal crop insurance program. Whole-farm revenue...

The objective of this article is to propose the use of moment functions and maximum entropy techniques as a flexible way to estimate conditional crop yield distributions. We present a moment based model that extends previous approaches in several dimensions, and can be easily estimated using...

Using trout producer survey data and the contingent valuation method, we estimate willing-ness to pay for a potential insurance policy. The survey was conducted in 2005 across the United States; 268 producers completed the survey instrument, resulting in a response rate of 81 percent. Design of...