Cotton farmers in the Piedmont region incorrectly believe conservation systems with winter cover crop and no-till cultivation yield less than conventional systems. We model the effect of organic matter on productivity and show how ignoring this effect causes returns to be underestimated. Farmers...

Residue management system (RMS) offers increase productivity gain to farmers by increasing the organic matter. Farmers have failed to realize this gain and consequently have not adopted RMS in cotton cultivation. Benefit of adopting RMS system appears sooner than farmers would think.

We test the likelihood of expansion for six market sectors based on the similarities between counties with and counties without organic markets. Results indicate that sales projections are overstated. Growth imbalance will continue to favor the West and North Central regions over the South and...

Peanut and corn are two major crops in the tri-state area of the Southeast US, an area encompassing North Florida, Southwest Georgia, and Southeast Alabama. Sharecroppers in this region apply higher amount of input in crop production than the average farmers. We analyzed the behavior of...

Organic farmers have traditionally relied on a variety of marketing channels, suggesting that earned organic income will depend on the farmer's experience in producing and selling organic products and their comparative advantage in bargaining and marketing skills. A discrete choice model of the...

The rapid upward shift in ethanol demand has raised concerns about ethanol’s impact on the price level and volatility of agricultural commodities. The popular press attributes much of this volatility in commodity prices to a price bubble in ethanol fuel and recent deflation. Market economics...

The primary purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that influence earned income of organic farmers explicitly incorporating farmer decisions to engage in local selling. The stochastic frontier model identifies role model producers who are the most technically efficient in achieving the...

Sustainability assessment is fundamental to improving the long- term viability of agricultural systems. A variety of assessment tools have been developed for the practitioner to evaluate sustainability at multiple levels, from field to farm. This report is a compilation of annotated references...

We examine consistency with economic theory of markup decisions for a risk averse firm facing demand uncertainty. We derive testable comparative static results that describe the influence on the markup of expected demand, demand uncertainty, average variable costs and exogenous demand shifters....