While the growing importance of off-farm earnings suggests large benefits accrue to farmers from efforts to expand off-farm income opportunities, survival still depends on greater efficiency. To comprehensively gauge the economic health of farm operator households we interpret off-farm income as...

Preliminary estimates of technical efficiency based on USDA data for 1997 through 2001 indicate that independent operations were significantly more efficient than contract operations. Preliminary estimates also indicate that both types of operations exhibited increasing returns to scale with...

Given that approximately half of all U.S. farmland is leased, absentee (non-operator) landowners have a significant role in agriculture. Because decisions about how to use farmland can be affected by ownership status, tenure can have far reaching implications for the production of food and...