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...

The cost of milk production by farm size was decomposed into frontier and efficiency components with a stochastic cost curve using data on 755 USA dairy farms from the year 2000. The estimated frontier function is much flatter than the composite cost curve, and although the frontier cost of...

The productivity of individual dairy farms, decomposed into efficiency and technological change components, was measured annually from 1985 through 1993 from distance functions estimated using nonparametric programming methods. Technology is measured regressively only if it is regressive to all...