This study analyzes a national survey of U.S. hog producers within a principal-agent framework in order to examine factors affecting contractor and grower success in hog contracting. Several factors had differential impacts on contractor and grower returns. Results suggest that there may be a...

A farmer's decision to contract or produce independently depends on the distribution of income under both arrangements, and on attributes associated with both business arrangements. Risk-averse farmers should be willing to pay a risk premium for the reduction in price risk provided by a...

Implementation of new CAFO regulations and EQIP payments could have important implications for the structure of the hog sector. This study uses a farm-level positive mathematical programming model to estimate the distribution of the economic and environmental effects of these new policies across...

Estimating how production contracts affect farm productivity is difficult because the decision to use a contract is endogenous to other decisions affecting productivity. This study uses the local availability of production contracts as an instrument for whether a farm uses a contract in order to...

We use administrative data from the Federal crop insurance program to examine how yield distributions change as farmers cycle into and out of the program. We are able to do this by linking many years of crop insurance data by individual farm conditioning observed yields on the particular county...

This study uses matching to evaluate the effect of decoupled payments on the acreage response of Iowa farmers who were in business in 1997 and 2002. Using farm-level panel data from the U.S. Agricultural Census, we examine whether farmers receiving high levels of 1997 agricultural payments per...

In recent years, structural changes in the hog sector, including increasing farm size and regional shifts in production, have altered manure management practices. Over the same period, changes to the Clean Water Act, new state regulations, and increasing local conflicts over odor have influenced...

There have been dramatic structural changes in the U.S. hog industry in the last two decades that have coincided with substantial increases in farm productivity. This study used a stochastic frontier analysis to measure TFP growth between 1992 and 2004 and to decompose the TFP growth into four...

Climate change could affect the costs and returns of livestock production by altering the thermal environment of animals thereby affecting animal health, reproduction, and the efficiency by which livestock convert feed into retained products (especially meat and milk). In the United States,...