Many of the U.S. railroads have introduced highly differentiated services for grain shipments in recent years, generally in the area of forward guaranteed car service. Taken together with other alternatives, these mechanisms have had the effect of establishing priority allocations among...

During the past decade, the grain shipping industry has become highly competitive and technologically advanced. These changes, along with the introduction of innovative shipping mechanisms, have made logistics management an important source of opportunity and risk for grain shippers. In this...

Agricultural firms that use Value at Risk (VaR) tend to be the large diversified corporations. The benefits of VaR in the agricultural industry are not limited to large conglomerates; however, and this study provides empirical examples of how mid to large sized commodity end-users can use VaR to...

Malt barley is an important specialty crop in the Northern Plains and growers mitigate risk with federally subsidized crop insurance and production contracts. However, growers face considerable risk due to "coverage gaps" in crop insurance that result in uncertain indemnity payments due to...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the dynamics of R&D investments, and the structure of the seed distribution sector using novel data sets that have not been used before to describe competition in these industries. The results describe four sets of issues of particular importance. One is...

One of the impacts of higher prices along with greater volatility in futures, basis and spreads is that there is pressure for greater use of cash contracts for grain. Indeed there has been growth in contracting for a number of competing crops in recent years. There is a wide array of cash...

One of the impacts of higher prices along with greater volatility in futures, basis and spreads is that there is pressure for greater use of cash contracts for grain. There is a wide array of cash contracts with varying terms that pose major strategic alternatives for buyers and the marketing...

The purpose of this study was to forecast grain and oilseed shipments through the Mississippi River system and to analyze impacts of delay costs. The focus is on the world grain trade and expected changes in response to a multitude of evolving competitive pressures and structural changes. The...

Roundup Ready® Wheat (RRW) was one of the first genetically modified (GM) traits for the wheat sector and was under review by regulatory agencies in the United States and Canada when Monsanto withdrew it from further consideration. There are a multitude of issues associated with the ex ante...

Roundup Ready® Wheat (RRW) was one of the first genetically modified (GM) traits for the wheat sector and was under review by regulatory agencies in the United States and Canada when Monsanto withdrew it from further consideration. There are a multitude of issues associated with the ex ante...