This study estimates the carbon footprint of a Henderson County, Kentucky grain farmer under different production strategies; traditional farming and precision agriculture technologies. Four constrained optimization, whole farm analysis models were formulated under no-till conditions. One of the...

This study combines whole farm economic analysis with biophysical simulation techniques in order to achieve a twofold objective. First, the study seeks to develop a multiple enterprise vegetable farm model with a production and marketing decision interface and, second, to determine optimal...

Specialty crop agriculture may be affected by immigration reform given that most farm workers are foreign-born and unauthorized for U.S. employment. Controlling for selection on legal status and job type according to skill level, this research examines the wage effects for workers with different...

Specialty crop farmers have expressed concern about labor shortages and cost increases which may arise with immigration reform. The large-scale mechanization of the Florida sugarcane harvest during the 1970s/80s serves as an historical example of how technologies evolved due to changes in local...

A cost function approach of induced innovation is used to measure the biases in U.S. agricultural technology between 1969-1999. The rate of technological change is explained by socioeconomic variables. The post-IRCA results show that an increasingly illegal workforce significantly induces...

The prospect of immigration policy reform has renewed growers’ concerns of serious labor shortages and cost increases given that a large portion of the workforce is unauthorized for U.S. employment. This concern of labor shortages and cost increases is more serious for specialty crop...

Immigration reform may significantly impact the specialty crops sector since more than half of the workforce is foreign-born and undocumented. Based on data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey, the trends pertaining to workers' legal status, employment and wage rates in the U.S. and...

The purpose of this study is to compare and contrast the profitability of different dairy management practices through precision livestock farming. Feed analysis and crop yields were simulated. Mathematical model was used for profit maximization. The results indicated that the proposed...

Precision deep tillage allows for lower use of tillage though recognized variation with in a field. Comparative enterprise budgets, breakeven, and sensitivity analysis were preformed to prove that under long-term no-till conditions precision deep tillage can be a profitable form of tillage that...

Using National Agricultural Workers Survey data, we estimate U.S. farm worker wage differentials by legal status. In order to adequately correct sample selection bias, we develop a Heckman-type two-stage method with an ordered probit model in the first stage and a wage equation model in the...