MOOCs on and off the Farm

Better Off, But Still on the Farm

This book, valuable but intermittently irritating, appears to have been written by two distinct Bernard E. Rollin personalities. One of them is Bernard E. Rollin the meliorist philosopher. BER-MP (as I shall henceforth refer to him) became well known with Animal Rights and Human Morality (fIrSt edition 1981, second edition 1992). He is a meliorist rather than an abolitionist inasmuch as he beli...

Farm Income Variability and the Supply of Off-Farm Labor

If farmers are risk averse, greater farm income variability should increase off-farm labor supply. This effect is confirmed for a sample of Kansas farmers. Off-farm employment of farmers and their spouses is also found to be significantly influenced by farm experience, off-farm work experience, farm size, leverage, efficiency, and farm-specific education. In addition, farm operators and spouses...

Off-Farm Income, Technology Adoption, and Farm Economic Performance

The economic well-being of most U.S. farm households depends on income from both onfarm and off-farm activities. Consequently, for many farm households, economic decisions (including technology adoption and other production decisions) are likely to be shaped by the allocation of managerial time among such activities. While time allocation decisions are usually not measured directly, we observe ...

Producer and farm characteristics, type of product, location: determinants of on-farm and off-farm direct sales by farmers

Off-Farm Labor Supply and Fertilizer Use

I develop a two-period stochastic dynamic programming model to explain the interaction between fertilizer use and off-farm labor supply. I use a well-known sample of farmers in the semi-arid tropics of India to test the model. I find that fertilizer use responds strongly to wages in the village labor market and that irrigation raises fertilizer use, while larger farmers use less fertilizer than...