Pork production has been evolving from relatively small, family-run operations toward large-scale operations with several employees. This study uses a national survey of pork producers and their employees to answer several questions about the structure of wages and benefits in this rapidly...

For a postscript copy of this paper, click <a href="/Data/isu/isu285.ps"> here. The paper examines changes in employment and wage patterns, industrial restructuring, and foreign competition that affect opportunities of recent immigrants to the non-metropolitan Midwest, especially to Iowa. The focus is on food and kindred...</a>

Although managing labor has become important for farm operations’ success, training and education for farm managers focuses on agricultural production management and few studies provide an empirical basis on how agricultural labor management differs from labor management in other industries....

In the past 20 years the average scale of hog operations has expanded more than fourfold, and some of the new large-scale hog feeding operations have been opposed by residents in some communities. While the environmental effects of such production have been relatively well studied, less examined...

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This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...