The long term prospects for cattle farmers in the province of Ontario will depend on their ability to stay competitive in a changing business environment: managing the returns to farm operations will be critical to their long run viability. Focusing on good management practices that reduce...

Risk management and efficient, well coordinated, flow-scheduling have an increasingly important role in the competitive pork production networks. Changes in input and output prices have resulted in distortions in the Finnish pig markets during the last years. The goal of this study is to...

The objective of this study is to assess the technical efficiency and other economic performance measures of southeastern U.S. cow-calf farms. We describe and compare cow-calf operations by size, farm resource regions, and states, and measure their relative competitiveness. We estimate a Cobb-...

Animal waste from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) is a significant contributor to the nitrate contamination of groundwater. Some manures also contain heavy metals and salts that may build up either in cropland or groundwater. To find cost-effective policies for pollution reduction...

Decision‐makers are keen to learn which policy instruments are most effective at producing forest conservation outcomes. Using data from a patchwork of programs designed to preserve the overwintering habitat of the Monarch butterfly in central Mexico, we compare the effectiveness of three...

Farm succession by the “next generation” is a key factor in the determination of industry structure and the total number of farmers and has profound implications for farm families which rely heavily on intergenerational succession. Our results indicate that, in addition to farm, operator,...

America’s agricultural producers continue to age. According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture, the average age of farm operators increased from 55.3 in 2002 to 57.1 in 2007. During the same period, the Census shows a thirty percent decrease in the number of farmers under the age of 25. Young...

Payment programs that incentivize conservation practices on farms produce additional environmental gains only if farmers receiving payments adopt practices that they would not have adopted without the payment. For some conservation practices, the “additionality” of payments may be low if...

In agriculture, long-term decisions are usually made in an environment which is almost completely dynamic. For example, uncertainty arises from weather and climatic conditions. (Dis)investment in irrigation technology on farms has become more prominent over the past decade. The use of irrigation...

This paper examines husband and wife perspectives on the division of authority over agriculture-related decision-making within households in Tanzania and Mali. We develop a theoretical model of intrahousehold “accord,” defined as the level of agreement between husbands and wives over who...