This article reviews literature on competitiveness of agricultural product and input markets. Although researchers in the United States and Europe emphasize different stages of the agricultural and food marketing system, their focus is similar: extent of buyer power, although both have largely ignored the sector supplying inputs to agriculture. The key conclusion is that there is little robust empirical evidence for food processing firms exerting buyer power, and there are limited data concerning vertical contracts between food processing and agriculture, but there is a small body of evidence concerning food retailer behavior and vertical coordination between food retailing and processing.

Ecosystem stewardship is an important goal of crop production management. The developing question has been the feasibility and profitability of best management practices (BMPs) associated with stewardship goals. Treatment-effects empirical estimates show that soybean crop ecosystem stewardship is likely to benefit from precision agriculture's (PA) information technologies to varying degrees. After accounting for the effect of overhead expenditures on technology adoption, and input costs on operating costs and profits, we show PA technologies also affect at least six BMPs. In one comprehensive framework, PA technologies affect profits, and improve crop production management through BMPs, with benefits for ecosystem stewardship.

Consumers implicitly incorporate their perceptions of products into their decision processes, yet little research has explicitly focused on how those perceptions influence demand for meat. This study incorporates taste, health, and safety perceptions into a discrete choice experiment for meat products at a grocery store. Our results indicate that taste is the most important perception as a 1-unit increase in the perceived tastiness (on a −5 to +5 scale) of a food product leads to a $0.60 increase in willingness to pay, whereas equivalent increases in perceived health and safety lead to $0.31 and $0.21 increases, respectively.

From December 2014 to June 2015, U.S. poultry was affected by highly pathogenic avian influenza that led to destruction of 48 million birds and losses in international trade. During the event, 45 countries placed trade restrictions on U.S. poultry exports, varying from regionalized to national poultry restrictions. Using a gravity model of trade, the effects on quantity traded is estimated for poultry exports at the aggregated and disaggregated commodity level to understand product flows during an event. Results indicate U.S. poultry exports benefit from countries willing to apply limited trade restrictions, and the trade impact varies across disaggregated commodities.

We examined the cross-national adoption of six major private food safety standards, focusing on the role of certifiers and international trade. Results show that the number of certification bodies existing in the domestic country, food exports, and the proportion of food exports to North America had positive effects on a country's adoption of food safety standards. Distance leads to product differentiation for the standards and therefore disadvantages developing countries in Africa and Asia for adopting the standards, which are all based in the United States or Europe. Providing these countries with better access to certifiers can alleviate this geographic disadvantage.

The use of surface water to replace groundwater for irrigation is often viewed as an effective approach for reducing groundwater overdraft on an agricultural landscape. However, the availability of surface water does not necessarily lead to groundwater conservation in practice. The expected increase in the aquifer volume in the presence of surface water does not occur unless the off-farm water price is low enough to generate a significant shift away from groundwater. There is a change in the crop pattern toward more irrigation-intensive crops, and the net effect can be a rise in groundwater extraction.

U.S. agriculture has seen a rapid adoption of biotechnology over the last two decades. This study investigates how biotechnology has affected U.S. farm input demand and agricultural productivity. The analysis relies on data at the national level and at the state level for selected states in the Corn Belt. It evaluates the rate of technological change and price elasticities of demand for agricultural inputs over time. The study documents the evolving biases in technological change in agriculture. It finds evidence that farm input demands have become more price inelastic.

This study evaluates the farmland price forecasts provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's Land Values and Credit Conditions Survey from 1991: quarter 1 (Q1) through 2016: Q1. Prior studies have demonstrated that similar surveys of agricultural bankers provide accurate predictions of the direction of future farm real estate values through qualitative forecast evaluation. This study extends the existing knowledge base by converting the qualitative responses to quantitative expectations. The quantified expectations are then subjected to additional forecast optimality tests, which suggest that the forecasts are unbiased but inefficient.