Faster agricultural development requires understanding whether the inverse land size-yield relationship exists or not. To verify the presence of this relationship, this study decomposes a yield index into separate components attributable to (1) efficiency, (2) soil quality, (3) land size, (4)...

Aflatoxins are poisons that occur naturally in the environment. They are produced mainly by the Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus fungi, which can affect many of important staple crops: maize, sorghum, millet, rice, oilseeds, spices, groundnuts, tree nuts, and cassava. Hot, humid,...

Farm management skills can affect farm managers' performance. In this article, farm management performance is analyzed based on yearly Illinois Farm Business Farm Management (FBFM) panel data across 6,760 farms from 1996 through 2011. Two out-of-sample measures of skill are used to analyze the...

This paper examines the impact of technical efficiency on the optimal exit timing of farms in a stochastic dynamic framework. Starting from a standard real options approach, we incorporate technical efficiency via a production function and derive an optimal price trigger at which farms...

Beef cattle production is responsible for approximately 2.2% of total US GHG production. In some agroecosystems, afforestation has the potential to sequester more carbon than other pasture and rangeland management practices. This research examines the factors, including an incentive, influencing...

This study determines the factors leading to adoption of split-sex and phase feeding by U.S. hog producers and consequently the impact of adoption on operation’s input cost performance. A sample selection model is employed to account for unobservable variables possibly being correlated with...

To support low-emission development strategies (LEDS) in the agriculture sector in Vietnam, this paper estimates marginal abatement cost curves (MACC) for mitigation options for rice cultivation in Vietnam: short-duration rice variety, draining of rice fields and reduced use of fertilizer or...

This study determines efficiency drivers, scale and technical efficiencies, and other economic performance measures for Southeastern U.S. meat goat farms. We estimate an input distance function (IDF) using stochastic production frontier (SPF) techniques. Empirical Monte Carlo (MC) simulation...

USDA conducts mandatory census survey every 5 year. According to the report the total amount of farms drops to 1,717,898 in 2012, which is 23.34% less then that in 1982. The number of farm exits varies from 906,100 to 652,597 during the 30 years. What are the factors influencing farm exit rates...