US swine production has undergone significant structural change in the last two decades, reflecting increasing size and specialization (Key and McBride; Key). In particular, the widespread use of contracting has enabled individual producers to grow by specializing in a single phase of production....

The objective of this study is to assess the scale and technical efficiencies and other economic performance measures of southeastern U.S. cow-calf farms. We describe and compare cow-calf operations by size and farm resource region and measure their relative competitiveness. We estimate an input...