What does Initial Farm Size Imply About Growth and Diversification?

Almuhanad Melhim, Erik O'Donoghue and C. Shumway

No 2008-5, Working Papers from School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University

Abstract: Recent consolidation in agriculture has shifted production toward fewer but larger farms, reshaping business relationships between farmers, processors, input suppliers, and local communities. We analyze growth and diversification of U.S. corn, wheat, apple, and beef, farms by examining longitudinal changes in ten size cohorts through three successive censuses. We fail to reject Gibrat’s law in apple and wheat industries and the mean reversion hypothesis in beef and corn industries. Apple and wheat farms diversify over time. Findings suggest that scale economies diminish for large farms across all four industries and scope economies dominate scale economies for large apple and wheat farms.

Keywords: firm growth; diversification; scale economies; scope economies; Gibrat’s law; longitudinal data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2008-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-cse
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://faculty.ses.wsu.edu/WorkingPapers/Shumway/FarmSize-jaaerevision.pdf First version, 2008 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://faculty.ses.wsu.edu/WorkingPapers/Shumway/FarmSize-jaaerevision.pdf [307 Temporary Redirect]--> https://ses.wsu.edu/faculty/)

Related works:
Journal Article: What Does Initial Farm Size Imply About Growth and Diversification? (2009)
Journal Article: What Does Initial Farm Size Imply About Growth and Diversification? (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsu:wpaper:shumway-3

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Danielle Engelhardt ().