The marginal benefit and cost of diversification for Florida orange producers is studied using certainty equivalents. The primary contribution of this study is the application of the mean-variance model to farm management decisions. Results indicate that for moderate and high levels of risk...

The marginal benefit and cost of diversification for Florida orange producers is analyzed using certainty equivalents. Results indicate that for moderate and high levels of risk aversion, diversification into strawberry, grapefruit, or additional orange production is not optimal. However,...

Purpose – Understanding complex farming organizations is important in the USA given the rapid consolidation of the agricultural production sector. Multiple entity farms arise from a desire to enhance the ability to transfer the farm from one generation to the next, a desire to affect tax...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss opportunities to obtain more information from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS). Specifically, the paper will explore the issue of survey nonresponse, the development of pseudo panels, and more frequent updating of cost of...

The present study uses local maximum likelihood (LML) methods recently proposed by Kumbhakar et al. (2007) to assess the technical efficiency of arable crop Kansas farms. LML techniques overcome the most relevant limitations associated to mainstream parametric stochastic frontier models. Results...

Flexible functional forms are used to examine the characteristics of production technologies. The Fourier functional form is capable of approximating any function globally, with the specified expansion. Unfortunately the exact form of the expansion is not known. The regularity conditions are...