Grain prices have risen sharply since 2005 and 2006 affecting livestock markets by increasingfeed prices and leading to significant volatility shocks. The high price levels and magnitude ofsustained high volatilities has raised concerns for many sectors of the economy, in particularthose with...

This study investigates non-parametrically the optimizing behavior of a sample of 289 Kansas farms under profit-maximization and cost-minimization hypotheses. The study uses both deterministic and stochastic non-parametric tests. The deterministic results do not support strict adherence to...

Grain prices have risen sharply since 2005 and 2006 affecting livestock markets by increasing feed prices and leading to significant volatility shocks. The high price levels and magnitude of sustained high volatilities has raised concerns for many sectors of the economy, in particular those with...

This study investigates nonparametrically the optimizing behavior of a sample of 289 Kansas farms under profit-maximizing and cost-minimizing hypotheses. The results do not support strict adherence to either optimization hypothesis. However, evidence against cost-minimizing behavior seems to be...

While in theory decoupled payments do not distort production decisions, in practice there are several potential coupling mechanisms for these payments. We use farm-level data from Kansas to revisit the issue of how (de)coupled are these supposedly “decoupled” payments by focusing on how they...

In the era of a global economy, farmers face increasing pressure in developing a portfolio of various marketing channels. However, the literature on direct marketing strategies has mainly focused on consumers. Using farm-level data this study investigates factors associated with the choice of...

The Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) collects information on income of farm households from a variety of sources. Traditionally, the amount of money income received during a calendar year has been the primary income measure for assessing the economic wellbeing of farm households....