A wide variety of insurance products is available to agricultural producers to insure against yield or price risks in the markets for the raw commodities they produce. Value-added enterprises, such as ethanol production, have been expanding over the last decade. This paper outlines the...

The successful expansion of the U.S. crop insurance program has not eliminated ad hoc disaster assistance. An alternative currently being explored by members of Congress and others in preparation of the 2007 farm bill is to simply remove the "ad hoc" part of disaster assistance programs by...

The increase in vertical integration in agriculture has been motivated by many factors including the evolving demand of consumers as well as factors specific to agricultural markets (i.e. production and price uncertainty and farm policy). The literature on agricultural contracts has focused more...

The vast majority of crop and revenue insurance policies sold in the United States are single-crop policies that insure against low yields or revenues for each crop grown on the farm. But, increasingly, producer income is based more on the value of crops that have been converted into a...

Panel data are used in almost all subfields of the agricultural economics profession. Furthermore, many research areas have an important spatial dimension. This article discusses some of the recent contributions made in the evolving theoretical and empirical literature on spatialeconometric...

The biodiesel industry in the United States has realized significant growth over the past decade through large increases in annual production and production capacity and a transition from smaller batch plants to larger-scale continuous producers. The larger, continuous-flow plants provide...

Generated crop insurance rates depend critically on the distributional assumptions of theunderlying crop yield loss model. Using farm level corn yield data from 1972-2008, we revisitthe problem of examining in-sample goodness-of-fit measures across a set of flexibleparametric, semi-parametric,...

Biofuels are meant to be an environmental friendly alternative for the use of fossil fuels. Thisidea led to the use of subsidies in order to support their production and use. In the USA, the EPAis in charge of establishing mandates to obligated parties and enforcing compliance....

Following the commodity price shocks in 2007, anecdotal evidence shows that tenant farmers experienced large increases in cropland rental rates and input prices. However, it is unclear how residual profits (crop revenue less non-land costs) resulting from the price increases within this sector...

The study measures farm credit risk by using farm records collected by Farm Business Farm Management (FBFM) during the period 1995-2004. The study addresses the following questions: 1) whether farm’s financial position is fully described by the structure model, 2) what are the determinants of...