A survey of extension administrators, department heads, and extension specialists was conducted to determine the best methods for evaluating the performance of extension economists. The results demonstrate how different groups view the relative importance of the various roles played by extension...

Traceability poses market opportunities and threats for U.S. red meat producers for at least two reasons. First, consumers are becoming more concerned about the inputs and practices used to produce food and the ability to trace red meat to its source is an essential step in providing information...

Traceable product systems provide a tool to track the inputs of a final good throughout the entire production chain. This tool can provide valuable information to consumers on verifiable characteristics of the product, can improve the speed of product recall, and can help identify areas of...

Beef packing has become an extremely concentrated industry, yet studies have found that little, if any, market power exists. We propose and test alternative measures of behavior that may better describe how packers control purchases from feedlots, using confidential data collected by the USDA...

This study is primarily concerned with investigating the technical, allocative, and scale inefficiency of owner-operators of dairy farms in Utah. A stochastic production frontier has been applied to analyze these inefficiencies. The results indicate that there is positive association between...

This article reports the results from a series of laboratory auction markets in which consumers bid on meat characteristics. The characteristics examined include meat traceability (i.e., the ability to trace the retail meat back to the farm or animal or origin), transparency (e.g., knowing that...

Linear programming techniques are used to illustrate the potential effects of targeted agricultural development interventions by non-governmental organizations. The results demonstrate the interconnection of nutrition, agricultural production, and economics in determining optimum decisions for...

This research investigates the differential effect of timing and product characteristic based measures of buyer concentration on the selling price of auctioned feeder cattle. Empirical results suggest that the fundamental dynamic price generation mechanism in feeder cattle auctions is affected...

This paper investigates the response of beef cattle producers to changes in the price of cattle. Previous research has suggested that there may be a negative short-run supply response to a permanent increase in the price of cattle. We build a dynamic, rational expectations model that predicts...