Livestock producers can respond to increasing consumer demand for certain production process attributes by providing verifiable information on the practices used. Consumer willingness to pay data were used to inform producer decision-making regarding selection of verification entities for four...

Averting or limiting the outbreak of infectious disease in domestic livestock herds is an economic and potential human health issue that involves both the government and individual livestock producers. Producers have private information about preventive biosecurity measures they adopt on their...

This paper examines the economics of farm decisions to prevent and control infectious livestock disease. In the case of diseases with costly control tolerating some level of disease is often rational to the producer. Public policy intervention is based on future value and public good aspects of...

Averting or limiting the outbreak of infectious disease in domestic livestock herds is an economic and potential human health issue that involves both the government and individual livestock producers. Producers have private information about preventive biosecurity measures they adopt on their...

Dairy managers today are faced with the decision to either raise their own replacements on the dairy farm or send heifers to a custom heifer grower. The largest potential challenge of contracting out the heifer raising enterprise revolves around the potential for a moral hazard problem because...

This report summarizes the financial and production records of 11 dairy grazing farms from across Michigan. These 11 farms indicated that they grazed dairy cows at least three months of the year and that grazing provided more than 30 percent of the forage consumed during the year. To be...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/22/08.

Dairy producers generally take a single output/multiple input approach when making production decisions. Under component pricing, with large variance in individual component prices, a multiple output/multiple input approach maximizes profits. This paper applied our approach to the individual...

We examine the young dairy futures market as a risk management tool. Using New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) data, we find that the BFP futures market is efficient and may potentially be a useful hedging tool. However, we also find that competition from Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) contracts...