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Abstract
The U.S. hog industry has experienced dramatic structural changes and rapid increases in
farm productivity. A stochastic frontier analysis is used to measure hog enterprise total
factor productivity (TFP) growth between 1992 and 2004 and to decompose this growth
into technical change and changes in technical efficiency, scale efficiency, and allocative
efficiency. Productivity gains over the 12-year period are found to be explained almost
entirely by technical progress and by improvements in scale efficiency. Differences in TFP
growth rates in the Southeast and Heartland regions were found to be explained primarily
by differences in farm size growth rates.