Marketing is viewed as an important component of the farm management process, and poor marketing is often cited as a cause of low farm incomes. However, widespread beliefs about poor performance are not based upon a large body of research, and available evidence is too limited to make definitive...

The purpose of this research report is to identify the appropriate market benchmark price to use to evaluate the pricing performance of market advisory services that are included in the annual AgMAS pricing performance evaluations. Five desirable properties of market benchmark prices are...

The purpose of this research report is to present an evaluation of advisory service pricing performance in 1998 for corn and soybeans. Specifically, the average price received by a subscriber to an advisory service is calculated for corn and soybean crops harvested in 1998. The average net...

The purpose of this research report is to present an evaluation of advisory service pricing performance in 1996 for corn and soybeans. Specifically, the average price received by a subscriber to an advisory service is calculated for corn and soybean crops harvested in 1996. The average net...

The purpose of this research report is to evaluate the pricing performance of market advisory services for the 1995-2000 corn and soybean crops. Certain explicit assumptions are made to produce a consistent and comparable set of results across the different advisory programs. These assumptions...

Mail surveys are a very popular instrument for researchers as well as government agencies and commercial firms to obtain information about farmers. A large percentage of farmers do not respond to these mail surveys. To gain insight into why farmers do not respond and their preferences regarding...

The purpose of this paper is to address two basic performance questions for market advisory services: 1) Do market advisory services, on average, outperform an appropriate market benchmark? and 2) Do market advisory services exhibit persistence in their performance from year-to-year? Data on...

Producers have a wide variety of risk management instruments available. How do producers make a choice of risk management instruments? Using the recently developed choice bracketing framework, we examine what risk management strategies producers use and identify the factors that drive their risk...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the marketing performance of wheat farmers in Illinois and Kansas over 1982-2004. The results show that farmer benchmark prices for wheat in Illinois and Kansas fall in the middle-third of the price range about half to three-quarters of the time....

This study suggests that confidence intervals for WASDE forecasts of corn, soybean, and wheat prices may be improved if they are estimated using an empirical approach. Empirical confidence intervals are calculated following Williams and Goodman's (1971) method and use historical forecast errors...