Milk pricing in California is often controversial. Consumer advocates and their organizations periodically charge that retail milk prices are “unfair” or “too high” and call for public intervention in the fluid-milk market. The consumer view is expressed by Consumers Union, which after conducting surveys of retail milk prices in Los Angeles and San Francisco area food stores, charged that large...

As a long term bidding behavior, bid shading is exhibited by wind farms participating in real Uniform Price (UP) markets. This signifies that the wind farm owners bid far below their true long run marginal cost. In this paper, a method is proposed to consider the uncertainty of bidding admission in the long term expected revenue of wind farms. We show that this consideration could perfectly exp...

Many farmers in the developing world have limited access to agricultural technologies and markets. Mobile phone-enabled services that offer price information and market linkages could contribute towards bridging this gap by reducing uncertainty about expected profits, information asymmetries and market inefficiencies. This article uses the example of the price information and marketing service ...

busy for most of the twentieth century. Policy after policy has been tried, rejected, then tried again in an attempt to solve the farm income problem. Ever since the New Deal, we have had price supports for many farm products. Since the Kennedy years, we have added direct payments to the relatively low price supports. All the while, supply control has been a part of most farm bills. None of thi...

A study of equilibrium acreage allocation decisions at the farm and regional levels under risk aversion, yield uncertainty, and endogenous crop prices is undertaken in a two-crop, two-region setting. The main insight is that a partial specialization in one crop at a regional level may be an equilibrium dominant strategy relative to the more diversified crop mix produced on farm. This is due to ...

The current market demand and price for organic milk is encouraging dairy producers, particularly those on smaller farms, to consider organic production as a means for improving the economic viability of their operations. Organic production systems vary widely in scale, in practices, and across agroclimatic settings. Within this context, case studies of 4 actual organic dairy farms were used to...