Research Areas
Agricultural Marketing, Supply Chain Coordination, and Consumer Demand Analysis
This area of research focuses on almost anything involved in moving agricultural products from the farm to the consumer, whether it be local or across international boundaries. Examples include research on commodity promotion, transportation, demand and price analysis, or how taxes affect consumer demand. In particular, we have extensive experience working on analysis of crop and livestock markets, local foods, and consumer demand for food and tobacco products.
Agricultural Production Economics
- Research in this area explores issues such as optimal production management decisions, profit maximizing resource allocation, economic opportunities for alternative production practices, the promise of new technologies and management strategies, production risk management, and farm finance. Areas of noteworthy research accomplishment at UK include determining optimal adaptive farm management behavior using whole farm analytical programming models, assessment of precision agriculture opportunities for increased farm profitability and reduced risk, economics of biofuel feedstock production, suitable field day prediction, and analyzing the farm-level implications of alternative farm policy and crop insurance designs.
Rural Community Economic Development
- Development economics is about understanding the mechanisms that cause some communities to prosper, while not others. In this time of unprecedented movement of ideas, tastes, people, and products, finding how communities can harness these potential forces for growth is an important and major challenge.