Obesity is one of the most pressing and widely emphasized health problems in America today. Beverage choices made by households have impacts on determining the intake of calories, calcium, caffeine, and vitamin C. Using data from the Nielsen Homescan Panel over the period 1998-2003, and a two-way random-effects Fuller-Battese error components procedure, we estimate econometric models to examine economic and demographic factors affecting per-capita daily intake of calories, calcium, caffeine, and vitamin C derived from the consumption of nonalcoholic beverages. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of the USDA 2000 Dietary Guidelines in reducing caloric and nutrient intake associated with nonalcoholic beverages.

Interest in mandatory county-of-origin labeling of fresh meats exists at both the state and national levels. A sample of beef handling firms in Louisiana (processors, retailers and restaurants) was surveyed by telephone to identify the characteristics of these firms that would help explain their decision to support or reject the law. A factor supporting the label use was a belief that the label is valuable to buyers. Negative factors were that the firm is a restaurant, is part of a chain or franchise, or has experience handling imported beef, and the belief that labeling merely reflects more government interference in free trade.

Both the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and the nonlinear ARDL frameworks are applied to model U.S. imports of cocoa beans from Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and the Dominican Republic (more than 90% of U.S. cocoa imports originate from these three countries). The results provide evidence of nonlinear and asymmetric pass-through of exchange rates, regional quality difference, and imperfect competition in U.S. cocoa imports. Furthermore, a rise or fall in U.S. income leads to an increase or decrease in U.S. cocoa imports.

We adopt an EASI model to estimate demand for omega-3, organic, cage-free, and conventional eggs in the United States. Our empirical framework accounts for demand inter-dependencies among these egg types, while allowing for unrestricted Engel curves, unobserved consumer heterogeneity, and a broader product and geographic coverage. We further address endogeneity of prices and expenditures and left-censoring induced by disaggregate data. Our results indicate that the demand for organic and cage-free eggs is price-elastic, while the demand for omega-3 and conventional eggs is price-inelastic. Additionally, we establish strong substitutability relationships between the eggs. Finally, we measure consumer welfare consequences of rising domestic egg prices brought by Japan’s egg import tariff reductions.

Fourteen percent of households in the United States faced some level of food insecurity in 2014. This study provides a review of the state of knowledge on food insecurity in the United States and the programs designed to combat the problem. A household decision-making model is used to frame the discussion. The study also provides suggestions for future research.

The influence of household demographic composition on rural migration in China has received limited attention. With data from a household survey in China's Sichuan and Hubei Provinces, this paper uses Probit models to explore the influence of household structure on migration decisions. It suggests that the three-generation household encourages out-migration, with the elderly playing an important role in supporting the migration of younger members by caring for their children. In contrast with earlier findings, the serious illness of an elderly member did not encourage the return of young migrants or discourage migration decisions unless the household included young children.

In an inverted market, current prices are higher than future prices and thus the price of storage is negative. Market inversions as measured with futures spreads rarely occur during early months of the crop year. However, market inversions frequently occur across crop years and near the end of the crop year. In the last half of the crop year, market inversions clearly reflect a signal to sell stocks. Too few inversions occur early in the crop year to reach a definitive conclusion for that period. Behavioral finance offers possible explanations of why producers would hold stocks in an inverted market.

The enterprise budget, whole farm cash flow, and income statement are fundamental tools of farm and ranch management. The “Microcomputer Budget Management System” (MBMS) is a microcomputer software package that facilitates the storage and use of information for crop and livestock budgeting. It performs the calculations for several1 enterprise budgeting formats and for preparation of whole farm resource use reports and financial statements. The MBMS also includes internal machinery and irrigation cost calculation routines.

MBMS was developed for use by extension staff, researchers, lenders, consultants, and operators of diversified farms and ranches with many enterprises that use enterprise and whole farm budgeting for analysis and planning activities. The flexibility and detailed nature of the program requires the user to have knowledge of enterprise budgeting and operation of complex computer programs. This paper presents a discussion of the features and capabilities of the software and the computational procedures used in the cost calculations.

While state government spending on early education has grown in recent years, accessibility of preschool programs for rural children remains a problem. Using census-tract data from a nationally-representative data set on U.S. children, multinomial logit estimation reveals significant differences in early education experiences between rural and nonrural children. Both rural children and children of less-educated mothers are less likely to participate in preschool. This paper concludes by discussing the appropriate role of local, state, or federal governments in funding rural preschool programs. While early educational investments are being touted as effective economic development tools, the nature of the positive externalities associated with preschool makes it unlikely that any single rural community would invest in high-quality programs without state or federal assistance.

The agricultural biotechnology industry has evolved from a focus on outstanding science to a more mature phase where firms focus on near-term products and building businesses. Understanding complex relationships and distribution channels and a global perspective are crucial to commercialization. Yet, leading-edge technology and early identification of key traits will be critical to developing superior products that ensure competitiveness in the marketplace. Monsanto is organizing around a life sciences model where seed, crop chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and food ingredient businesses will exploit mutual synergies driven by basic science and discovery.

A tobit econometric procedure was used to examine the effect of selected demand and supply factors on nonreal estate agricultural lending by commercial banks in Texas. Results show that banks have reduced their agricultural loan portfolios in response to increased use of interest sensitive deposits after deregulation. Moreover, almost half of this decrease came from banks that stopped making agricultural loans. Also, results show that banks affiliated with multi-bank holding companies lend less money to agriculture relative to their assets than do independent banks.

An adaptive regression model is used to examine the relative importance of cash and government support prices in determining cotton production over time. The results show that the cash price is more important as a source of price information for cotton producers than the government program price. The cash price was shown to have a greater influence on acreage response in every year, including periods thought to be dominated by government commodity programs.

This paper investigates rural residents' perceptions of the risk to water quality from large confinement facilities and their willingness to pay to delay nitrate contamination from these facilities. Rural residents are concerned about the environmental impact of confinement facilities and are willing to pay as much as $82 annually to delay nitrate contamination in their water for 20 years. These contingent valuation results are consistent with the result obtained in similar studies that used hedonic valuation methods.

This study extends previous empirical research on land preservation by considering an actual land preservation scheme, the agricultural land reserve in British Columbia, Canada. The reserve was established in 1973 to ensure that development did not occur on the province’s most productive agricultural land. ‘To ensure that local food production is maintained,’ ‘the economic importance of British Columbia's agricultural sector,’ and ‘to protect the environment’ are the most important factors that underlie support for the reserve. Aggregate, provincewide willingness to pay to maintain the land reserve is substantial, with our most conservative estimate being Can$91.18 million per year.

This study evaluates attitudes toward production of three major types of biomass—corncobs, corn stover, and dedicated energy grass—using responses to a mail survey of 2,250 Iowa farmers. We examine how factors influencing willingness to supply biomass vary across biomass types and analyze the presence of potential correlations across interest in growing various types of biomass. We find that correlation in choices across biomass types is strong and statistically significant. Farmers consider corn stover and corncobs as complementary, but dedicated energy grasses and corncobs or stover as substitutes. Factors affecting farmer choices also vary significantly by type of biomass.

Because of considerably increased farmland prices, not only in Germany, the question arises whether farmland is still affordable for farmers. Hence, there is a call for price caps. If farmland prices are to be capped by political intervention, identifying the main farmland price determinants especially for the highest prices is essential. Using quantile regression for German standard farmland values, we find heterogeneous relationships across the estimated quantiles for several covariates. Nonagricultural factors are often more pronounced at the upper tail of the conditional distribution. We recommend focusing primarily on factors in the upper quantiles to prevent further farmland price increases.

A hedonic model was employed to examine factors impacting feeder cattle prices at a monthly video auction in Tennessee. Home-raised cattle were estimated to have a $2 per cwt. premium and cattle that have been tested for PI-BVDV (persistent infections with bovine viral diarrhea virus) sold for a premium of $1.19 per cwt. We also show how price varies across sale months for steers and heifers, suggesting opportune times to market gender-specific lots. Corn price was interacted with an average weight per head of the lot to show that lighter cattle were negatively affected, while heavier cattle prices were positively affected by increasing corn prices.

Research on producer willingness to adopt individual best pasture management practices (BMPs) is extensive, but less attention has been paid to producers simultaneously adopting multiple, complementary BMPs. Applications linking primary survey data on BMP adoption to water quality biophysical models are also limited. A choice-experiment survey of livestock producers is analyzed to determine willingness to adopt pasture BMPs. Sediment abatement curves are derived by linking estimates of producer responsiveness to incentives to adopt rotational grazing with a biophysical simulation model. Current cost share rates of $24/acre should yield a 12% decrease in sediment loading from pastures.

This paper examined organic fertilizer adoption and its effects on two household food security indicators and gender-based farm labor use among smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana. An endogenous switching regression analysis shows that observed and unobserved farmer background factors determine farmers’ decision to adopt organic fertilizer as well as the outcomes from adoption. On average, adoption is associated with an 11% increase in per capita food consumption and a 55% reduction in household food gap duration. Adoption is also related to an increased labor use by 5.9 (90%) of female worker days and 1.3 (9%) of male worker days per acre, placing nearly all (82%) of the increased labor burden on female farmhands. We recommend mitigation of factors that hinder farmers from adopting the input and provision of female-user-friendly labor-saving devices for organic fertilizer use tasks.

With increasingly thin margins and new technologies, it is important that farm managers know their cost of field operations on a per unit basis (e.g., acre, ton, bale). Accurate per unit costs give confidence when constructing enterprise budgets and evaluating new technologies, such as no-till. Custom rates are often used as a proxy for per unit costs; however, this research, using entropy and jackknife estimation procedures, found that custom rates understate total ownership and operating costs by approximately 25% for an average Kansas farm. Estimates from these models are then used to benchmark actual costs against expected cost.