We use a sales database of farmers market vendors in the Washington, D.C., area to estimate how first half 2020 sales were impacted by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. We use 2019 data as a counterfactual for sales that would have occurred in 2020 in the absence of COVID-19. For neighborhood weekend markets that were able to remain open during the pandemic, the change in 2020 average sales between the winter and spring is between 75% and 79% lower than in 2019. Other farmers markets, particularly weekday markets in business districts, experienced delayed openings or were closed for the entire year.

This article investigates the short- and long-term costs of an extreme weather event on retail food prices and consumer expenditures. We utilize the 2011 severe peanut drought as a quasi-natural experiment and find that retail peanut butter prices increased 21.3% as a result of the drought-driven shock in farm peanut production and prices. Moreover, we identify long-term costs due to positive asymmetric price transmission as retail peanut butter prices returned to pre-shock levels much more slowly and remained on average 6.2% higher for 4 years after farm peanut prices returned to pre-shock levels. For consumers, the drought increased peanut butter costs, and the persistence of higher prices in peanut butter led to long-term consumer costs. Peanut butter expenditure on average increased by 4.8% post-shock, with lower-income households increasing expenditures even more. A simple calculation estimates that higher peanut butter prices inflicted a cost of $1.08 billion during the shock, and sticky post-shock peanut butter prices imposed a cost of $628 million to U.S. consumers.

A study of 1,558 US households in June 2020 evaluated utilization of online grocery shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic, influences on utilization, and plans for future online grocery shopping. Nearly 55 percent of respondents shopped online in June 2020; 20 percent were first-timers. Cragg model estimates showed influences on online shopping likelihood and frequency included demographics, employment, and prior online shopping. Illness concerns increased likelihood, while food shortage concerns increased frequency of online shopping. A multinomial probit suggested 58 percent respondents planned to continue online grocery shopping regardless of pandemic conditions.

We measure the economic impact of varietal improvement and technological change in flue-cured tobacco across quantity (e.g., yield) and quality dimensions under a voluntary quality constraint. Since 1961, flue-cured tobacco breeders in the United States have been subject to the Minimum Standards Program that sets limits on acceptable quality characteristics for commercial tobacco varieties. We implement a Bayesian hierarchical model to measure the contribution of breeding efforts to changes in tobacco yields and quality between 1954 and 2017. The Bayesian model addresses limited data for varieties in the trials and allows easy generation of the necessary parameters of economic interest.

We adopt an EASI model to estimate demand for omega-3, organic, cage-free, and conventional eggs in the United States. Our empirical framework accounts for demand inter-dependencies among these egg types, while allowing for unrestricted Engel curves, unobserved consumer heterogeneity, and a broader product and geographic coverage. We further address endogeneity of prices and expenditures and left-censoring induced by disaggregate data. Our results indicate that the demand for organic and cage-free eggs is price-elastic, while the demand for omega-3 and conventional eggs is price-inelastic. Additionally, we establish strong substitutability relationships between the eggs. Finally, we measure consumer welfare consequences of rising domestic egg prices brought by Japan’s egg import tariff reductions.

This paper examined organic fertilizer adoption and its effects on two household food security indicators and gender-based farm labor use among smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana. An endogenous switching regression analysis shows that observed and unobserved farmer background factors determine farmers’ decision to adopt organic fertilizer as well as the outcomes from adoption. On average, adoption is associated with an 11% increase in per capita food consumption and a 55% reduction in household food gap duration. Adoption is also related to an increased labor use by 5.9 (90%) of female worker days and 1.3 (9%) of male worker days per acre, placing nearly all (82%) of the increased labor burden on female farmhands. We recommend mitigation of factors that hinder farmers from adopting the input and provision of female-user-friendly labor-saving devices for organic fertilizer use tasks.

A breeding female’s perceived value is a complicated process and depends on a combination of expected production costs, reproductive success, and calf values. A conceptual asset value model based on female characteristics as signals and net implicit marginal value expectations is developed. A hedonic model based on sequentially sold individuals at multiple Mississippi auction locations is estimated by panel regression. Among other findings, pregnant females are discounted in proportion to abortion risk, which decreases toward birth. A follow-up cost/benefit analysis indicates producers are better off from at home pregnancy checking and selling only nonpregnant females or cow/calf pairs.

United States certified organic and conventional dairy farms are compared on the basis of economic, financial, and technological measures using dairy data from the 2016 USDA Agricultural Resource Management Survey. A stochastic production frontier model using an input distance function framework is estimated for U.S. dairy farms to examine technical efficiency and returns to scale (RTS) of farms of both systems and by multiple size categories. Financial and economic measures such as net return on assets and input costs, as well as technological adoption measures are compared by system and size. For both systems, size is the major determinant of competitiveness based on selected measures of productivity and RTS.

We estimate a travel cost model for the George Washington & Jefferson National Forests using an On-Site Latent Class Poisson Model. We show that the constraints of ad-hoc truncation and homogenous preferences significantly impact consumer surplus estimates derived from the on-site travel cost model. By relaxing the constraints, we show that more than one class of visitors with unique preferences exists in the population. The resulting demand functions, price responsive behaviors, and consumer surplus estimates reflect differences across these classes of visitors. With heterogeneous preferences, a group of ‘local residents’ exists with a probability of 8% and, on average take 113 visits.