Economic Performance Measures of Southeastern U.S. Cow-Calf Farms: Which Types of Farms Are the Most Efficient? Berdikul Qushim1, Jeffrey Gillespie1, and Richard Nehring2 1 Louisiana State University Agricultural Center; 2USDA-Economic Research Service
[email protected],
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Poster prepared for presentation at the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association’s 2012 AAEA Annual Meeting, Seattle, Washington, August 12-14, 2012
Copyright 2012 by Berdikul Qushim and Jeffrey Gillespie. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. The views expressed are the authors and should not be attributed to the Economic Research Service or USDA.
Economic Performance Measures of Southeastern U.S. Cow-Calf Farms: Which Types of Farms are the Most Efficient? Berdikul
1 Qushim ,
1Louisiana
Jeffrey
1 Gillespie ,
and Richard
2 Nehring
State University Agricultural Center; 2USDA-Economic Research Service
Abstract Abstract
Table. Statistically Significant Cobb-Douglas Production Function Estimates
The Model
The objective of this study is to assess the technical efficiency and other economic performance measures of southeastern U.S. cow-calf farms. We describe and compare cow-calf operations by size, farm resource regions, and states, and measure their relative competitiveness. We estimate a CobbDouglas production function using stochastic production frontier (SPF) techniques. Our results suggest there is opportunity for most cow-calf operations to increase the efficiency of their operations.
We use a Cobb-Douglas production function. The Cobb-Douglas functional form has performed favorably compared with more flexible functional forms in measuring production firms’ relative efficiency levels using production functions. For the beef cow-calf production model, we employ the following model to estimate factors affecting the technical efficiency of southeastern farms: 4
Introduction
𝑙𝑛𝑦𝑖 = 𝛼0 +
Cow-calf farms are important contributors to the U.S. agricultural economy. Cow-calf production takes place on a large number of small farms. Farms with
