Interest is growing in weather insurance within the agricultural sector but its use has been limited by the difficulty in defining the appropriate weather event and the lack of agreement on how to price the product. In this paper we develop a new insurance pricing method for weather insurance...

The US hog and dairy sectors are increasingly shifting production toward western states away from more traditional production regions in the east. In contrast, production levels in the fed-cattle sector have increased over the last three decades only in the three main producing states. One...

This paper argues that under a commercial export milk program the market value of quota will be determined by the spread between the domestic market price and the export price rather than the conventional wisdom that it is determined by the spread between the domestic milk price and the marginal...

The use by farmers of futures contracts and other hedging instruments has been observed to be low in many situations, and this has sometimes seemed to be considered surprising or even mysterious. We propose that it is, in fact, readily understandable and consistent with rational decision making....

Inducing farmers to adopt alternative, more environmentally friendly production practices has been attempted in a variety of ways ranging from moral suasion to direct regulation to economic instruments. Among the most common instruments are voluntary cost-share programs that involve taxpayers...