Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) is an important staple in Burkina Faso as well as many other countries in West Africa. Among the major cowpea pests affecting the crop are the legume pod borer (Maruca vitrata), flower thrips (Megalurothrips sjostedti), bruchids (Callosobruchus maculatus), and...

Despite of the important role international migration fills in the United States’ labor-intensive agricultural sector, few studies have addressed the individual characteristics and circumstances surrounding entry and exit by farm laborers. With increasing public attention on international...

In recent decades there has been a substantial increase in the scale of production and the use of production contracts in the hog sector. This paper explores empirically whether these two phenomena are related by examining whether the use of production contracts has allowed finish hog operations...

Supermarkets are currently gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on farming efficiency have hardly been studied. Productivity effects in previous studies are also estimated with...

Food legumes play an important and diverse role in the farming systems and in the diets of poor people around the world. They are ideal crops for simultaneously achieving three developmental goals in targeted population—reducing poverty, improving human health and nutrition, and enhancing...

This paper proposes and applies an innovative estimation approach for farm group programming models using Generalised Maximum Entropy. The proposed set-up simultaneously determines calibrating cost function parameters and input allocations to production activities. The methodology is applied to...

The increasing use of production contracts in the hog sector has reduced the number of spot market transactions, raised concerns about price manipulation and helped to spur legislation requiring price reporting by packers. Using data from the 2002 and 2007 Censuses of Agriculture, this study...