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Projecting net incomes for Texas crop producers: an application of probabilistic forecasting

Agricultural policy changes directly affect the economic viability of Texas crop
producers because government payments make up a significant portion of their net farm
income (NFI). NFI projections benefit producers, agribusinesses and policy makers, but
an economic model making these projections for Texas did not previously exist.
The objective of this study was to develop a model to project annual NFI for
producers of major crops in Texas. The Texas crop model was developed to achieve this
objective, estimating state prices, yields and production costs as a function of their
national counterparts. Five hundred iterations of national price and yield projections
from the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI), along with FAPRI’s
average production cost projections, were used as input to the Texas crop model. The
stochastic FAPRI Baseline and residuals for Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) equations
relating Texas variables to national variables were used to incorporate the risk left
unexplained by OLS equations between Texas and U.S. variables.
Deterministic and probabilistic NFI projections for Texas crops were compared
under the January 2005 and January 2006 FAPRI Baseline projections. With production
costs increasing considerably and prices rising moderately in the January 2006 Baseline, deterministic projections of 2006-2014 Texas NFI decreased by an average of 26 percent
for corn, 3 percent for cotton, 15 percent for peanuts, and 12 percent for rice, and were
negative for sorghum and wheat. Probability distributions of projected NFI fell for all
program crops, especially sorghum and wheat. Higher hay price projections caused
deterministic projections of NFI for hay to rise roughly 13 percent, and increased the
probability distributions of projected hay NFI. Deterministic and probabilistic
projections of total NFI decreased for each year, especially for 2006-2008 when fuel
price projections were the highest.
The Texas crop model can be used to simulate NFI for Texas crop producers
under alternative FAPRI baselines. The model shows the impact of baseline changes on
probability distributions of NFI for each crop and for Texas as a whole. It can also be
useful as a policy analysis tool to compare impacts of alternative farm and
macroeconomic policies on NFI.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/4134
Date30 October 2006
CreatorsEggerman, Christopher Ryan
ContributorsRichardson, James W.
PublisherTexas A&M University
Source SetsTexas A and M University
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeBook, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text
Format400569 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital

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