U.S. dairy production is consolidating into fewer but larger farms. This report uses data from several USDA surveys to detail that consolidation and to analyze the financial drivers of consolidation. Specifically, larger farms realize lower production costs. Although small dairy farms realize...

This paper presents and applies different approaches to estimate returns to scale in multiple-input multiple-output technologies. Scale efficiency gives quantitative information of scale characteristics. A primal based approach to estimate the scale elasticity is proposed as an alternative to...