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Abstract
The crop farming sector has been relatively profitable in the past several years, whereas the
general economy has gone through a great deal of turmoil. In this research, we constructed an
AgIndex, which tracked the stock prices of publicly traded companies dealing with agriculture
performed since 2000. As a group, the market values of publicly traded firms within
the AgIndex exceeded those of Standard & Poors 500 (S&P 500) since 2000. Returns were
higher for agricultural firms compared with S&P 500 firms. Performance varied across agricultural
sectors with fertilizer and seed companies performing the best.