The prospect of immigration policy reform has renewed growers’ concerns of serious labor shortages and cost increases. These concerns are more serious for specialty crop agriculture, not only because it is highly labor intensive, but also it requires labor in a very short period, particularly...

This paper presents preliminary results on the possible demand for weather insurance in China. Results from 1,564 farm households from Western and Central China between October 2007 and October 2008 suggest that the greater risk for farmers is drought followed by excessive rain. Heat is less...

The study addresses problems in measuring credit risk under the structure model, and then proposes a seemingly unrelated regression model (SUR) to predict farms’ ability in meeting their current and anticipated obligations in the next 12 months. The empirical model accounts for both the...

An agronomic crop growth model, Decision Support System for Agro-Technology Transfer (DSSAT), is used to find optimal crop management strategies for cotton production in Mitchell, Miller, and Lee Counties in Georgia during the past 10 years. Planting date and irrigation threshold are the two...

This paper investigates the effect of government-provided crop insurance on farm failure rates. By exploiting random variation in weather and the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act of 1994, which mandated crop insurance coverage for the first time, I employ two natural experiments that identify...

A farm’s physical investment is affected by its fundamental q and by its financial situation, with the later comprising both the firm’s liquidity and its possibility of facing capital market imperfections. This study determines the effects of government payments, depreciation, and inflation...

Classical and count data regression models are estimated to predict improvement in three key financial indicators—net worth, debt-to-asset ratio and current ratio—as well as the number of loan restructurings and delinquencies. Data consist of Farm Service Agency direct loans originated in...

This paper tries to justify the observation of different return patterns in the upstream and downstream sectors of US beef production. It builds a dynamic rational expectation model separating the cow-calf and feeding sector with the former sector being the residual claimer. The model shows that...

Risk classification of livestock farms can help stakeholders design and implement risk management measures according to the possessed risk. Our goal is to examine how differently pig farms may contribute to the societal costs of an animal disease outbreak, how valuable this information is to...