Agriculture’s strong financial performance is projected to ease in 2012, with declines for all three measures of sector earnings. •Net farm income is forecast to fall to $91.7 billion in 2012, down 6.5 percent from the 2011 forecast, but still the second highest nominal value on record....

We study the demand by organic farmers for technical advice using a quantile regression for the demand of organic farmers for consultations with private information providers. There is substantial heterogeneity in the impact of critical explanatory variables on consultations of organic farmer....

A stochastic frontier model is used to explain the performance evaluation by organic producers of programs provided by the U.S. university extension systemproviders. We identify nonmanagerial factors that influence both performance ratings and performance efficiency, defined as achieving a...

Competition from new store formats including supercenters, warehouse clubs, and mass merchandisers has emerged as a major threat to traditional grocery chains. A primary objective of this paper is to understand how the store-level performance is related to the workforce composition of full-time...

A set of rigorous diagnostic techniques is used to evaluate the forecasting performance of five multivariate time-series models for the U.S. cattle sector. The root-mean-squared-error criterion along with an evaluation of the rankings of forecast errors reveals that the Bayesian vector...