Organic agriculture has established a foothold in many U.S. farm sectors, particularly among horticultural specialties, but the overall use of organic practices lags behind that of many other countries. Recent data from several producer surveys illustrate notable differences and similarities...

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...

Rapid change in the size and ownership structure of U.S. hog production has created new and varied challenges for the industry. This report describes an industry becoming increasingly concentrated among fewer and larger farms, and becoming more economically efficient. These changes have not come...

U.S. dairy production is consolidating into fewer but larger farms. This report uses data from several USDA surveys to detail that consolidation and to analyze the financial drivers of consolidation. Specifically, larger farms realize lower production costs. Although small dairy farms realize...

The costs and benefits of policies designed to regulate the use of production contracts will depend in part on the impact of these contracts on farm productivity. In this paper we measure the impact of contracting on 1) partial and total factor productivity and 2) the production technology for...

U.S. livestock production has shifted to much larger and more specialized farms, and the various stages of input provision, farm production, and processing are now much more tightly coordinated through formal contracts and shared ownership of assets. Important financial advantages have driven...