Given the relatively small industry scale of cow-calf operations in New York to other regions of the country, little is known about differences in determinant values for feeder cattle. Using auction prices and quality characteristics over 7 years, differences in market, lot, and quality parameters suggest opportunities for improved marketing performance. A delta profit model is constructed to inform timing of marketing decisions for producers. The results indicate a relatively high potential for producers to increase farm returns by delaying sales of lighter-weight feeder cattle from the fall to spring auction months, given sufficient rates of gain and reasonable overwintering costs.

Crop insurance has been linked to changes in farm production decisions. In this study, we examine the effects of crop insurance participation and coverage on farm input use. Using a 1993–2016 panel of Kansas farms, evidence exists that insured farms apply more farm chemicals and seed per acre than uninsured farms. We use a fixed effects instrumental variable estimator to obtain the effects of change in crop insurance coverage on farm input use accounting farm-level heterogeneity. Empirical evidence suggests that changes in the levels of crop insurance coverage do not significantly affect farm chemical use. Thus, moral hazard effects from purchasing crop insurance are not large on a per acre basis but can lead to expenditures of $6,100 per farm.

Over the past three decades, the cereal subsector in Ghana has contributed immensely to food security in the country. However, limited evidence exists on the production performance of this subsector, particularly in terms of heterogeneities across agro-ecological zones. This paper analyzes the production technology and performance of the cereal subsector in Ghana using a nationally representative data set from 26,449 cereal farms and the meta-stochastic frontier approach. The empirical results suggest that the estimated factor inputs contribute substantially to cereal output, with land and seed exerting the highest impacts across all agro-ecological zones. The evidence further shows that the agro-ecology of cereal farms plays a crucial role in the performance of the subsector. The mean technical efficiency estimates strongly suggest that cereal farms in all agro-ecologies exhibit some degrees of production inefficiency. The findings further reveal total output from the meta-frontier to be much superior to those generated by cereal farms in all agro-ecologies of Ghana, indicating the existence of opportunities for cereal output gains in all agro-ecologies. We find heterogeneities in farm management practices and production technology across the various crops and agro-ecological zones to be relevant sources for cereal productivity growth in Ghana.

Farm diversification is mainly driven by risk mitigation effects and economic gains related to complementarities between production activities. By combining these two aspects, we investigate diversification economies in a sample of French mixed sheep farming systems and rank these systems using stochastic dominance criteria. Partially diversified systems (Sheep-Grass, Sheep-Crop, Sheep-Landless) and fully diversified systems (Sheep-Grass-Crop-Landless) were evaluated. We find a high degree of diversification diseconomies in the sheep farming systems considered. The results also indicate that the fully diversified system is driven by its risk-reducing effects (including downside risk exposure) and that Sheep-Crop is the dominant system in terms of risk-adjusted returns.

Cattle feed yards routinely track and collect data for individual calves throughout the feeding period. Using such operational data from nine U.S. feed yards for the years 2016–2019, we evaluated the scalability and economic viability of using machine learning classifier predicted mortality as a culling decision aid. The expected change in net return per head when using the classifier predictions as a culling aid as compared to the status quo culling protocol for calves having been pulled at least once for bovine respiratory disease was simulated. This simulated change in net return ranged from −$1.61 to $19.46/head. Average change in net return and standard deviation for the nine feed yards in this study was $6.31/head and $7.75/head, respectively.

In this paper, we apply an indirect production function approach to analyze producers’ output and input allocation choices under expenditure constraints. Our estimation results show that financial constraints induced a nonoptimal usage of smallholder farm inputs, resulting in losses in potential productivity of approximately 25%. It appears that the presence of a binding expenditure constraint has led to an underutilization of fertilizer and manure as well as an overutilization of seed.

Discrete choice experiments are used to collect data that facilitates measurement and understanding of consumer preferences. A sample of 750 respondents was employed to evaluate a new method of best-worst scaling data collection. This new method decreased the number of attributes and questions while discerning preferences for a larger set of attributes through self-stated preference “filter” questions. The new best-worst method resulted in overall equivalent rates of transitivity violations and lower incidences of attribute non-attendance than standard best-worst scaling designs. The new method of best-worst scaling data collection can be successfully employed to efficiently evaluate more attributes while improving data quality.

Food security in many developing countries has been threatened by several factors such as unequal land distribution, ineffective land reform policies, inefficient agricultural value chains, and an increasing number of climate disasters. In Nigeria, these threats are exacerbated by rapid population growth and extreme weather events, which have resulted in farmer-herder conflicts in most agrarian communities. This paper examines the differential impacts of the incidence and severity of farmer-herder resource use conflicts on food insecurity of rural households in Nigeria. We employ a two-stage predictor substitution model to estimate survey data collected from 401 rural households in Nigeria. The empirical results show that both the incidence and the severity of farmer-herder conflicts significantly increase food insecurity, and the severity of these conflicts has a larger impact than their incidence. The estimates of the conditional mixed process models confirm the robustness of our results. Additional analysis reveals that the incidence and severity of farmer-herder conflicts positively and significantly affect food insecurity, measured by the number of days with limited varieties of food eaten. Our findings highlight the importance of policy interventions that address ongoing farmer-herder conflicts in affected countries like Nigeria to enhance food security from a sustainable development perspective.