Are futures prices exogenous to agricultural supply? It depends. We argue that crop yield shocks were predictable during the 1961-2007 period because high planting-time futures prices tended to indicate that yield would be below trend. This feature of the data implies that regressions of...

Perennial crop production is inherently dynamic due to several salient physical characteristics including an establishment period of several years with low or no yields, long lives in commercial production (40 years or more), and path-dependence of yields on input use and other exogenous...

This study seeks to provide a rigorous theoretical and empirical understanding of the effects of exogenous geographic and climate-related factors on the first three moments of crop yields. We hypothesize that exogenous geographic and climate factors that have beneficial effects on crop...

This article reviews the current literature on USDA farm-level data reports and looks at the impact of information contained in the USDA Crop Production report on U.S., Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Wisconsin corn prices. A hypothesis is tested concerning the significance of the...

U.S. farm output, from the 1930s until 1981, increased steadily, but growth stopped in the 1980s. Now, after 9 years of volatility, total farm output is less than it was in 1981. The largest decline occurred in the production of grains and oil crops such as soybeans. This stagnation of the 1980s...

The Marketing Order for California almonds was amended in 2007 to enhance food safety. Around 400-500 million pounds of almonds undergo an added step in processing to reduce risk of salmonella contamination. This paper reports on the logistics necessary for implementing the program. We use a...

This study analyzes U.S. cocoa bean imports from twenty-one major cocoa-producing and exporting countries during the pre- and post-liberalization period of 1970-2008 using the gravity equation and a linear one-way fixed effects model. The objective was to measure trade creation for a World Trade...

Blueberries are experiencing a major increase in acreage in Georgia and the Southeast region. The demand for blueberry crop budgets is at an all-time high. Due to the world economic crisis, agricultural input prices are constantly fluctuating. The increase or decrease in input prices has a...