Shifts in livestock technology, programming, and composition: exploring the future of livestock agriculture

U.S. production agriculture is continuously evolving. Technological advancements, policy interventions, and consolidation are three major components to our current agricultural industry. The first essay in this dissertation highlights a change in technology, improved genetics, and estimates the relationship between genetic selection and farm profitability. Genetic selection is measured by net merit, which is an index based on economically relevant traits that ranks U.S dairy cattle based on their expected lifetime profitability. The second essay analyzes risk management practices for dairy producers through the Margin Protection Program for Dairy (MPP) and the Dairy Margin Coverage Program (DMC). These risk management programs were introduced in the 2014 Farm Bill to address volatility in the dairy industry, and we used a fractional logit regression to estimate factors associated with farm MPP/DMC participation. The third essay tests the Goldschmidt hypothesis which states that increasing farm scale negatively impacts community well-being (Goldschmidt 1947). We estimated the relationship between livestock consolidation and county economic indicators (unemployment rate, GDP, ag GDP, per capita personal income).

Author dc:creator

• Weir, Rebecca

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/11299/278112

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:conservancy.umn.edu:11299/278112