Increased demand for corn for ethanol production has helped push grain prices to record levels. This has increased livestock production costs, and producers have responded with changes to production systems. This paper explores the degree to which costs can be mitigated with alternative feeds,...

Several recent papers have used annual changes and monthly data to estimate demand systems. Such use of overlapping data introduces a moving average error term. This paper shows how to obtain consistent and asymptotically efficient estimates of a demand system using seasonally differenced data....

Real-time ultrasound information taken on beef heifers prior to backgrounding is used to develop a logit model to aid heifer retention decisions. The value of ultrasound data is calculated as the difference in certainty equivalents between a decision rule incorporating ultrasound information and...

A feeder-calf price model is estimated which incorporates elements of break-even budget analysis, including estimates of placement weights, slaughter weights, ration cost, and feed-conversion rates. From this model, a corn price multiplier is calculated which quantifies the corn/feeder-calf...