Mean variance analysis of winter wheat stocker cattle: distribution of cash, traditional hedge, and calendar spread gross margins

2022 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.The purpose of this research is to evaluate historic returns for Oklahoma stocker cattle wheat pasture operations using cash and futures prices to determine potential risk management strategies that optimize returns and reduce risk. Returns are only evaluated for the stocker segment of dual-purpose winter wheat production. Producers face risk in a variety of forms; however, price risk and basis risk are the main interests of this analysis. The cash market for feeder cattle is subject to notable price volatility because of external market factors such as demand for feeder cattle from feedlot operations, changes in input prices like pasture and corn, availability of inputs, and feeder cattle supply levels. Price moves occur that impact the purchase cost and sale revenue of stocker operations that can result in unexpected financial losses. Risk management strategies have the potential to mitigate price risk associated with stocker cattle production. Cash gross margins were evaluated for a variety of production scenarios that represent Oklahoma winter wheat production to develop a baseline for expected gross returns. The traditional hedge was evaluated over the 21-year period for each scenario to determine the influence of using basis adjusted futures prices to calculate a projected forward sale price, prior to the sale in the physical cash market. Calendar spread margins were calculated using basis adjusted futures prices for the appropriate futures contracts, purchase weight and sale weight of each scenario for the summer to fall period prior to the purchase of cattle. Finally, cash, hedging, and spread returns were compared to determine how the three strategies impact gross margin returns and the variance of returns

The Consumptive Use of Water in Milford Valley, Utah

Consumptive use, as used in this thesis, is defined as the sum of the volumes of water used by the vegetative growth of a given area in transpiration and building of plant tissue and that evaporated from adjacent soil, snow, or intercepted precipitation of the area in any specified time, divided by the given area. If the unit of time is small, the consumptive use is expressed in acre-inches per acre or depth in inches, whereas, if the unit of time is large, such as growing season or a 12-month period, the consumptive use is expressed as acre-feet per acre or depth in feet or inches

Finite Element Integration on GPUs

We present a novel finite element integration method for low order elements on GPUs. We achieve more than 100GF for element integration on first order discretizations of both the Laplacian and Elasticity operators.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure

Topological Optimization of the Evaluation of Finite Element Matrices

We present a topological framework for finding low-flop algorithms for evaluating element stiffness matrices associated with multilinear forms for finite element methods posed over straight-sided affine domains. This framework relies on phrasing the computation on each element as the contraction of each collection of reference element tensors with an element-specific geometric tensor. We then present a new concept of complexity-reducing relations that serve as distance relations between these reference element tensors. This notion sets up a graph-theoretic context in which we may find an optimized algorithm by computing a minimum spanning tree. We present experimental results for some common multilinear forms showing significant reductions in operation count and also discuss some efficient algorithms for building the graph we use for the optimization