The Contribution of Financial Management Training and Knowledge to Dairy Farm Financial Performance

Cooperative Extension and other institutions (e.g., technical colleges, on-line self study programs, university short courses, etc.) frequently stress the importance of financial management education for successful farming operations. The research reported in this paper attempts to quantify the contributions of such training to the financial performance of dairy farms in Wisconsin. Our results suggest a link between a deeper understanding of financial concepts and greater financial returns but that it is a relatively weak one. Moreover, simple exposure to farm management training programs and self-confidence in farm financial decision-making ability are not significantly related to farm financial outcomes.     

Using choice question formats to determine compensable values: The case of a landfill-siting process

Siting noxious facilities, such as community landfills, is a challenging problem for local planners who recognize the importance of economic efficiency and equity, political acceptance, and meeting federal regulatory standards. Meeting these criteria requires technical and socio-economic analyses in conjunction with public input. Planners may also recognize that political acceptance requires compensation for the host community, either in the form of monetary or in-kind transfers. Following Breffle and Rowe [Breffle, W.S., Rowe. R.D., 2002. Comparing choice question formats for evaluating natural resource tradeoffs. Land Econ. 78 (2), 298–314], we use a “resource-to-resource” paired-comparison survey method to estimate compensatory values associated with an in-county landfill for both the host and non-host communities. Our results indicate that while a host-community household's minimum willingness to accept payment for hosting a landfill may exceed a non-host-community household's maximum willingness to pay, a large difference in population sizes between the two communities enables the landfill to pass a Kaldor potential compensation test.     

A Comparative Analysis of Recombinant Bovine Somatotropin Adoption across Major U.S. Dairy Regions

Trends and determinants in the adoption of recombinant bovine somatotropin are examined using data from across the United States. The core findings are: ( a ) moderate adoption rates and relatively small impacts on national milk production; ( b ) substantial disadoption, farmers who have tried the technology but stopped using it; ( c ) no significant differences in characteristics between adopters and disadopters; and ( d ) major differences between nonadopters and farmers who have tried the technology, with the latter group having significantly higher use rates of complementary, productivity-enhancing technologies and larger herd sizes. This last result holds across states with distinctive herd size distributions.     

The Dynamics of Agricultural Biotechnology Adoption: Lessons from series rBST Use in Wisconsin, 1994–2001

This article exploits panel data from Wisconsin dairy farmers to examine the dynamics of recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) adoption and to identify the characteristics that distinguish among nonadopters, disadopters, and early and late adopters. Panel methods are used to control for omitted variables and endogenous regressors that call into question coefficient estimates derived from cross-section adoption models. The results, however, confirm previous findings that larger farms with complementary feeding technologies are more likely to adopt rBST, nonadopters appear quite unlikely to become adopters, and rBST adoption will remain at rather moderate levels in Wisconsin.