The problems of pastoralist livestock marketing systems in East Africa are well-documented in the literature. They include poor transport infrastructure, inadequate market access and frequent rejection of animals at certain markets. Thus far, few studies have analyzed the effects of eliminating...

Federal and State regulatory agencies are considering switching from a nitrogen-based manure disposal policy to one that is phosphorus-based. This analysis estimates the compliance costs of this policy change for a representative hog-grain farm in Wabash County, Indiana. The representative farm...

A hypothetical choice experiment was conducted to determine consumers’ willingness to pay for three verified production practice attributes (pasture access, antibiotic use, and individual crates/stalls) in smoked ham and ham lunchmeat. These attributes were verified by the USDA Process...

Current methods of formulating animal rations lead to excess nutrient excretion which can potentially lead to excess manure nutrients and an increase in economic costs. These methods do not recognize the impact of diminishing returns. The objective is to simultaneously optimize feed ration...

The importance of heterogeneity of animal attributes in livestock production is assessed. Preliminary results indicate that variance and skew measures of attributes may be becoming more important over time.

The following paper outlines a new econometric model designed to capture both the temporal and spatial dynamics of housing prices. The paper combines existing spatial econometric techniques with a model that allows parameters to evolve over time. In addition, we provide an empirical application...

This research tests for causality between indexed retail pork revenues and pork advertising. Evidence was found of feedback between revenues and total pork advertising, but not between revenues and generic advertising. In fact, generic advertising was found to have no significant impact on...

Increased litter sizes and associated piglet performance consequences, challenge swine producers. Stochastic modeling captured bioeconomic performance of individual piglets. As average litter size increased from 8.8 to 20.8 piglets, costs and revenues per head marketed from the demonstration...

Much of the increase use of vertical coordination in the U.S. swine industry has taken place through contract production. While the incidence of contracting is much higher in nontraditional hog production areas, a growing number of Midwestern producers are being faced with contract options. A...