The Weak Axiom of Profit Maximization (WAPM) was used to test how successful each of 70 individual New York State dairy farms was in maximizing profits using nine years of data. The netput vectors were corrected for technological change using nonparametric indices that do not require the...

The objectives of this review were to evaluate economic techniques used to determine the cost and benefit of Listeria monocytogenes control and to estimate the economic optimum of L. monocytogenes food safety measures. The level of food safety measures is optimal if marginal benefit and marginal...

Data from the same 138 New York dairy farms for the years 1994 through 1997 were used to estimate whether Bovine Somatotropin (bST) generated profits for adopters. Data from these same farms from 1993 were used to sort farms into groups by production per cow, profit per cow, and farm size, in...

The Dixit entry/exit real option model, modified to accommodate a milk price support regime, was applied to the entry/exit decisions of New York dairy farmers. Results varied by farm size, but for the 500-cow farm the entry milk price is $19.09 and the exit milk price is $11.66 when farmers were...

We use DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) techniques to determine if measured inefficiencies are caused by a missing management input. We replace the quantity of operators’ labor with estimates of the value of labor and management, and then with net farm income from the previous year, to...

Production and profit impacts from the use of recombinant Bovine Somatotropin (rbST) on dairy farms were estimated using switching regression, with separate regressions for rbST-using farms and non-rbST-using farms. To correct for potential self-selection bias, a probit adoption function was...

A stochastic cost efficiency equation was estimated for the U.S. dairy industry using national data from the production year 2000. The cost of producing a unit of milk was estimated into separate frontier and efficiency components, with both components estimated as a function of causation...