Agriculture’s strong financial performance is projected to ease in 2012, with declines for all three measures of sector earnings. •Net farm income is forecast to fall to $91.7 billion in 2012, down 6.5 percent from the 2011 forecast, but still the second highest nominal value on record....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss opportunities to obtain more information from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS). Specifically, the paper will explore the issue of survey nonresponse, the development of pseudo panels, and more frequent updating of cost of...

A stochastic frontier model is used to explain the performance evaluation by organic producers of programs provided by the U.S. university extension systemproviders. We identify nonmanagerial factors that influence both performance ratings and performance efficiency, defined as achieving a...

We study the demand by organic farmers for technical advice using a quantile regression for the demand of organic farmers for consultations with private information providers. There is substantial heterogeneity in the impact of critical explanatory variables on consultations of organic farmer....

A key organizational decision for retailers is whether to self-distribute or rely on a wholesaler-supplied network and yet little is known about the impact of this strategic choice on store-level productivity. We estimate a stochastic frontier model for food retailers that accounts for...

The Internet may reduce constraints on a farmer's ability to receive and manage information, regardless of where the farm is located or when the information is used. Using a Count data estimation procedure, this study attempts to examine the key farm, operator, regional, and household...

A stochastic distance function frontier was estimated using data from a national survey of organic farmers to evaluate the effect of farm-specific attributes on efficiency. Farm-specific and regional variables that shift efficiency were incorporated into the multioutput distance function,...