While there are few risk management alternatives available to specialty crop growers, weather derivatives provide an important advancement. As with the use of any derivatives contract, the behavior of the basis will ultimately determine the net-hedged outcome. However, when using weather...

Agricultural cooperatives are participating in mergers, acquisitions, strategic alliances, and joint ventures at a record pace. While post-post merger performance has been examined extensively for investor owned firms, this has not been the case for agricultural cooperatives since these firms do...

The fruit and vegetable industry does not have a risk management instrument or a well-structured price discovery system, such as commodity futures contracts, to aid in the marketing and management of its price risk. Since the 1980s, financial futures contracts based on indexes of stocks,...

Numerical simulation of several typical risk management strategies using pro forma financial statements from representative U.S. dairy cooperatives shows that combinations of forwards, swaps, and cash marketing strategies for output (cheese), along with various forward contracts offered to...

Agricultural cooperatives tend to be riskier than investor-oriented firms, both in a business and financial sense. However, cooperative managers are often reluctant to actively manage risk. Although the risk management irrelevance proposition suggests that cooperative managers should be unable...

Revenue insurance represents an important new risk management tool for agricultural producers. While there are many farm-level products, Group Risk Income Protection (GRIP) is an area-based alternative. Insurers set premium rates for GRIP on the assumption of a continuous revenue distribution,...

VaR gives a prediction of potential portfolio losses, with a certain level of confidence, that may be encountered over a specified time period due to adverse price movements in the portfolio's assets. For example, a VaR of 1 million dollars at the 95% level of confidence implies that overall...

Value-at-Risk, known as VaR, gives a prediction with a certain level of confidence of potential portfolio losses that may be encountered over a specified time period due to adverse price movements in the portfolio's assets. For example, a VaR of 1 million dollars at the 95% level of confidence...

Economists and others need estimates of future cash price volatility to use in risk management evaluation and education programs. This paper evaluates the performance of alternative volatility forecasts for fed cattle, feeder cattle, and corn cash price returns. Forecasts include time series...

Invasive insect species cause billions of dollars of direct and indirect damage to U.S. crops each year. The market for insuring insect damage is, however, far from complete. The objective of this study is to design and value insect derivatives, or "bug options," which would offer growers a...