Anaerobic digesters can provide renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from manure management. Government policies that encourage digester adoption by livestock operations include construction cost-share grants, renewable electricity subsidies, and carbon pricing (offset) programs....

The increasing use of production contracts in the hog sector has reduced the number of spot market transactions, raised concerns about price manipulation and helped to spur legislation requiring price reporting by packers. Using data from the 2002 and 2007 Censuses of Agriculture, this study...

In recent decades there has been a substantial increase in the scale of production and the use of production contracts in the hog sector. This paper explores empirically whether these two phenomena are related by examining whether the use of production contracts has allowed finish hog operations...

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,...

The U.S. hog industry has experienced dramatic structural changes and rapid increases in farm productivity. A stochastic frontier analysis is used to measure hog enterprise total factor productivity (TFP) growth between 1992 and 2004 and to decompose this growth into technical change and changes...

The increasing size and specialization of hog operations reflect structural change in U.S. swine production during the past 15 years. The number of farms with hogs has declined by over 70 percent, as hog enterprises have grown larger. Large operations that specialize in a single phase of...