The development of the field-scale Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator (EPIC) model was initiated in 1981 to support assessments of soil erosion impacts on soil productivity for soil, climate, and cropping conditions representative of a broad spectrum of U.S. agricultural production regions....

Rate setting procedures for United States crop yield and revenue insurance contracts employ methods that presume correlations to be state invariant. Whether this is true matters. If yield-yield correlations strengthen when crops are subject to widespread stress, then diversification...

In recent years, the organic sector has grown steadily and significantly. However, little economic research has been performed on risk management in organic agriculture, likely because of the lack of available data. This lack of data may also be why the creation of the current crop insurance...

The modeling of price risk in the theory and practice of commodity risk management has been developed far beyond that of crop yield risk. This is in large part due to the use of plausible stochastic price processes. We use the Pólya urn to identify and develop a model of the crop yield...

We examine four scenarios for the evolution of the biofuel sector using a partial equilibrium model of the world agricultural sector. The model includes the new Renewable Fuels Standard in the 2007 energy act, the two-way relationship between fossil energy and biofuel markets, and a new trend...

The outlook for U.S. corn markets is inextricably linked to what happens to the U.S. ethanol industry, which depends, in turn, on the level of government subsidies and mandates. We develop a stochastic partial equilibrium model to simulate outcomes for the corn market for the 2008/09 marketing...

This study investigates the implications of treating different environmental benefits as the primary target of policy design. We focus on two scenarios, estimating for both of them in-stream sediment, nutrient loadings, and carbon sequestration. In the first, we assess the impact of a program...

Based on the Ricardian rent theory, this study employs the variable profit function to analyze the determinants of Iowa cropland cash rental rates using county-level panel data from 1987 to 2005. Accounting for spatial and temporal autocorrelations, responses of local cash rental rates to...

Using pooled regional time-series data and panel data estimation, we quantify the impact of monthly ethanol production on monthly retail regular gasoline prices. This analysis suggests that the growth in ethanol production has caused retail gasoline prices to be $0.29 to $0.40 per gallon lower...

The effect of sampling error in estimation of farmers' mean yields for crop insurance purposes is explored using farm-level corn yield data in Iowa from 1990 to 2000 and Monte Carlo simulations. We find that sampling error combined with nonlinearities in the insurance indemnity function will...