This article establishes the cost-efficiency frontier and its variation over time for a sample of 610 farms in Kansas for ten consecutive years, from 1995 to 2004. The primary objective consists of examining how financially constrained firms affect cost efficiency and its components, allocative,...

For countries that could not benefit from the Green Revolution due to heterogeneous and unfavorable biophysical environments, agricultural biotechnology potentially provides a means of improving the quality and quantity of agricultural production. This paper analyses some of the major issues...

This paper uses two different techniques to measure efficiency in a panel of two hundred multi-product Kansas farms from the period 1984 to 2004. The non-parametric linear programming technique, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA); and a parametric stochastic frontier approach, a translog production...

Options on cattle futures have expanded the realm of alternative marketing strategies available to cattle feeders. This study utilized actual feedlot data to compare the return distributions from 31 separate fed cattle marketing strategies using cash, futures, put option, and call option...

A static premium and discount analysis was used to determine whether certain management or marketing practices affect the price of feeder cattle at auction. Data included animal characteristics (sex, weight, muscle, frame, horns, breed, condition, fill, health) and market characteristics (price,...

Feeder cattle prices are determined by the interaction of many factors. This study uses 1986 and 1987 Kansas feeder cattle auction data to investigate the impact of a wide variety of physical characteristics, many of which have not been used in previous studies on feeder cattle prices. Unlike...