The local foods movement and alternatives to traditional agriculture are gaining considerable interest, not only in Kentucky, but throughout the country. This research provides information that may aid farmers in the decision to invest or not in the alternative agricultural enterprise of...

The objective of this study is to assess the scale and technical efficiencies and other economic performance measures of southeastern U.S. cow-calf farms. We describe and compare cow-calf operations by size and farm resource region and measure their relative competitiveness. We estimate an input...

Market channel alternatives that include garden centers, landscapers, mass merchandisers and re-wholesalers have contributed to the growth of ornamental crops sales in the United States (U. S.). The homogenous subpopulation of the U.S. nursery producer was clustered using mixture of export...

Revenue insurance with shallow loss protection for farmers has been introduced recently. A common attribute of most shallow loss proposals is that they would be area-revenue triggered. The impact on optimal hedge ratios of combining these shallow loss insurance proposals with deep loss...

Mechanization and technological advancement has been the cornerstone of agricultural prosperity in the United States and has served as a flagship to the rest of the world. Farm machinery and equipment sales for the three largest manufactures in 2011 reached nearly $60 billion and higher sales...

Arkansas is the top domestic rice producer, representing nearly half of total U.S. rice production. Rice is a high-cost crop relative to other field crops in Arkansas, and production costs for rice have increased significantly since the mid 2000s due to rapidly increasing fuel and fertilizer...

This article examines what differentiates "socially responsible" farmers (i.e., those who rank environmental benefits higher than profit, based on a Likert style ranking) from farmers who make decisions based solely on financial criteria. A proportional odds model (POM) is proposed to estimate...

This research examines challenges for a young and beginning cow-calf producer in Oklahoma. Scenarios were developed for native and introduced forage bases with different terms for financing the operation. The returns generated from a cow-calf operation in Oklahoma make purchasing land difficult,...

Growers’ preferences for a number of marketing contract attributes as well as the effect of growers’ risk perception and risk preferences on the choice of marketing contracts were examined with the use of a choice experiment. The main data source for the study is a mail survey administrated...