Purpose – This paper aims to identify factors that affect agricultural mortgage default and prepayment. Design/methodology/approach – Using a sample of farm credit system loans, prepayment and default are modeled as competing risks with potentially non‐stationary covariates using a...

Purpose – While the demand for weather‐based agricultural insurance in developed regions is limited, there exists significant potential for the use of weather indexes in developing areas. The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of historical data availability in designing...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a dynamic, stochastic, mechanistic simulation model of a dairy business to evaluate the cost and benefit streams coinciding with technology investments. The model was constructed to embody the biological and economical complexities of a dairy...

Purpose – Anaerobic digestion (AD) of livestock waste is a potential source of renewable energy and can reduce the methane emissions associated with livestock waste storage. Because AD is capital intensive, lenders will play a key role in the adoption of this technology. The purpose of this...

Purpose – The US Department of Energy has a goal to make ethanol from biomass cost competitive with petroleum by 2012. Feedstock procurement is expected to represent a significant portion of the operating costs for a refinery that produces ethanol from biomass such as switchgrass. Thus,...

Purpose – For agricultural bankers, agribusiness managers, and salespeople, understanding customers and their preferences and behaviors is crucial to success. The two goals of this paper are first to identify today's distinct market segments for financial products for US crop and livestock...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the losses of weather‐related insurance at different regional levels. The possibility of spatial diversification of insurance is explored by estimating the joint occurrence on unfavorable weather conditions in different locations, looking...

Purpose – While the extant literature is replete with theoretical and empirical studies of value at risk (VaR) methods, only a few papers have applied the concept of VaR to quantify market risk in the context of agricultural finance. Furthermore, papers that have done so have largely relied on...

Purpose – In self‐directed retirement plans, farmers are responsible for selecting the types of risky investments toward which the funds in their retirement plan are allocated. Furthermore, farmers do not necessarily purchase sufficient annuities with their savings upon retirement. There is...