My background is unique for an agricultural economist. First, I grew up on a grain and beef farm in Illinois. Second, I worked in private industry (DeKalb Genetics – now part of Monsanto) for 6 years. Third, I have degrees in areas outside of agricultural economics. These include an MBA and a bachelors and masters degree in agricultural mechanization,
My choice of economic tools include: Quantrix for nearly any problem involving data manipulation. Excel for general spreadsheet work. R for econometric analysis. Stella for dynamic modeling. ModelRisk (an Excel addin) for risk and simulation modeling. Filemaker for databases.
Focus Areas
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- Farm Profitability
- I develop crop budgets for the state of Kansas using a budget generator tool to convert a farmer’s field operations and inputs into costs
- I develop analysis of farms in the Kansas Farm Management Association Program
- Farm Risk Analysis
- I use the Excel addin ModelRisk to help model risk. ModelRisk allows me to include correlated distributions of uncertain variables in the analysis
- Farm financial analysis
- Farm production and farm management