Engineering Commons^™

Producer Long-Term Marketing Opportunities With Ethanol Plants, Austin Harthoorn, Logan Lloyd, Cory Walters, Kate Brooks

Cornhusker Economics

Commodity marketing operates in a complex decision environment with constant information flow, which can conceal long-run financially profitable marketing opportunities for producers. In the corn marketing space, the competitive role of ethanol plants throughout the state may provide producers with long-run financial gains by strategically approaching marketing decisions. In this article, we characterize whether producers can gain financially from strategically marketing corn to ethanol plants. For example, do ethanol plants provide a better long-run return from pre-harvest hedging, spring sale, or harvest sale?

We investigate three important contracting times--forward contract for harvest delivery (called pre-harvest hereafter), harvest delivery, and spring …

Deficit Irrigation Management For Irrigated Corn In Nebraska: Economically Viable?, Lia Nogueira, Cory Walters, Emily O'Donnell, Wesley Peterson, Suat Irmak

Cornhusker Economics

In this study we determine the economic value of deficit irrigation management using both technological and methodological advancements. The use of soil moisture probes represents the technological improvement. We provide improvements in the methodology as follows. Regarding data, we employ a field-size study, instead of plots, where the irrigation decision is determined by the moisture level in the soil measured through a soil moisture probe. Regarding the understanding of the yield response to water, although we examine the commonly used quadratic function, we improve upon this specification by also examining an alternative response function, the linear response stochastic plateau. Our …