Expected Payments and Considerations for the New ACRE Program

The 2008 Farm Bill provided an option for receiving commodity program payments through existing programs or a new revenue-based alternative – the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program. ACRE is a state-level revenue program which, if elected, replaces the price-based countercyclical program. Enrollment requires the forfeiture of 20 percent of a producer’s direct payments and reduces loan rates by 30 percent. This article provides estimates of long-term expected ACRE payments for corn, soybean, and wheat acres across a variety of states. Within the cornbelt, expected ACRE payments are similar across regions for each of the crops considered, and will likely exceed the required reduction in direct payments. Outside of the cornbelt, expected ACRE payments vary considerably.Farm Management, Production Economics,

A Spatial Approach to Addressing Weather Derivative Basis Risk: A Drought Insurance Example

Risk and Uncertainty,

Readdressing the Fertilizer Problem

The production literature has shown that inputs such as fertilizer can be defined as risk-increasing. However, farmers also consistently overapply nitrogen. A model of optimal input use under uncertainty is used to address this paradox. Using experimental data, a stochastic production relationship between yield and soil nitrate is estimated. Numerical results show that input uncertainty may cause farmers to overapply nitrogen. Survey data suggest that farmers are risk averse, but prefer small chances of high yields compared to small chances of crop failures when expected yields are equivalent. Furthermore, yield risk and yield variability are not equivalent.corn, nitrogen fertilizer, risk-increasing, yield risk, Crop Production/Industries,

Risk and Incentives: A Not-So-Tenuous Trade-off

Risk and Uncertainty,

An Empirical Analysis of the Determinants of Marketing Contract Structures for Corn and Soybeans

Contracts serve as coordination mechanisms which allocate value, risk, and decision rightsacross buyers and sellers. The use of marketing contracts in agriculture, specifically for crop production,has been increasing over the past decade. This study investigates the determinants ofagricultural marketing contract design employing data from the USDA’s Agricultural ResourceManagement Survey. Models are estimated to analyze the association between producer and contractorcharacteristics, the decision to produce under contract, and the types of contract structuresobserved in practice, while controlling for the potential for endogenous matching betweencontracting parties. Results indicate that while certain producer characteristics are significantlyassociated with the decision to produce corn or soybeans under contract, there is no significantassociation between those characteristics and specific contract attributes.

Empirical Analysis of the Determinants of Marketing Contract Structures

Marketing,

Measurement of Farm Credit Risk: SUR Model and Simulation Approach

The study addresses problems in measuring credit risk under the structure model, and then proposes a seemingly unrelated regression model (SUR) to predict farms’ ability in meeting their current and anticipated obligations in the next 12 months. The empirical model accounts for both the dependence structure and the dynamic feature of the structure model, and is used for estimating asset correlation using FBFM data for 1995-2004. Farm credit risk is then predicted by copula based simulation process with historical default rates as benchmark. Results are reported and compared to previous studies on farm default.Credit Risk Measurement, Seemingly Unrelated Regression Model, Simulation, Agribusiness, Agricultural Finance, Farm Management, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Risk and Uncertainty,

Evaluating Yield Models for Crop Insurance Rating

Generated crop insurance rates depend critically on the distributional assumptions of the underlying crop yield loss model. Using farm level corn yield data from 1972-2008, we revisit the problem of examining in-sample goodness-of-fit measures across a set of flexible parametric, semi-parametric, and non-parametric distributions. Simulations are also conducted to investigate the out-of-sample efficiency properties of several competing distributions. The results indicate that more parameterized distributional forms fit the data better in-sample due to the fact that they have more parameters, but are generally less efficient out-of-sample–and in some cases more biased–than more parsimonious forms which also fit the data adequately, such as the Weibull. The results highlight the relative advantages of alternative distributions in terms of the bias-efficiency tradeoff in both in- and out-of-sample frameworks.Yield distributions, Crop Insurance, Weibull Distribution, Beta Distribution, Mixture Distribution, Out-of-Sample Efficiency, Goodness-of-Fit, Insurance Rating Efficiency, Farm Management, Financial Economics, Land Economics/Use,

A Guatemalan Soycow Cooperative: Is the Whole Greater than the Sum of its Parts?

Teaching Notes available upon request: [email protected]; Author video:http://www.youtube.com/user/ifamr1?feature=mhum#p/u/8/FhUZu2lt6NsSoycow, cooperative, Guatemala, teaching case, Agribusiness, Q10,