Browsing by Author "Bonanno, Alessandro, committee member"
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Item Open Access Agricultural manufacturing location decisions in Colorado: implications for rural economic development policy(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Sheridan, Claire, author; Jablonski, Becca, advisor; Weiler, Stephan, committee member; Bonanno, Alessandro, committee member; Cabot, Perry, committee memberMany rural areas face unique challenges that put them at a competitive disadvantage relative to urban areas. State and Federal policies in the U.S. promote opportunities for value-added agriculture (manufacturing) as a means to create and retain wealth in rural places. In order to inform policies that might attract agricultural manufacturing firms to rural locations, this research explores agricultural firm location decisions using a case study of Colorado. First, this research creates a unique dataset of agricultural manufacturing firms in the State of Colorado and uses these data to assess if the traditional factors associated with neoclassical firm location theory (such as wages, tax rates and population) are correlated with agricultural manufacturing firm locations. Second, we conduct in-depth interviews with selected food manufacturing firms located in Colorado's heterogonous Western Slope. Results suggest a behavioral framework (where assets other than profit increase welfare) may better explain how agricultural manufacturing firms choose to locate in rural places. We recommend bottom-up policies that allow communities to promote entrepreneurship and take advantage of location-based comparative advantages as a means to attract agricultural manufacturing firms to rural Colorado.Item Open Access Mapping temperature decline in beef cattle during conventional chilling(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Klauer, Brenna Lynne, author; Woerner, Dale R., advisor; Belk, Keith E., committee member; Nair, Mahesh N., committee member; Bonanno, Alessandro, committee memberA continued increase in beef carcass weights has likely caused need to adjust chilling practices in order to chill carcasses appropriately with respect to food safety and beef quality. The objectives of this study were to track continuous temperature decline of beef carcasses of varying size, gain insight on how fat thickness and carcass size affect overall chilling rates, and to model temperature decline in deep muscle tissue of 6 muscles and one beef carcass surface location. Temperature recorder thermocouples were placed in 7 carcass locations and temperature was measured every 30 seconds from post electrical stimulation until the carcasses were removed from the postmortem chilling coolers (hot boxes) to be graded. Carcass temperatures were measured at the geometric center of the 1) brisket/plate (deep pectoral), 2) deep chuck (medial side of scapula/clod heart), 3) deep tissue (Semimembranosus), 4) Gluteus medius (Sirloin), 5) Longissimus dorsi at the 12th rib, 6) surface (5mm under the fascia) at the 11th rib, 7) Psoas major (Tenderloin), and 8) ambient per group of carcasses. Carcasses were classified into groups consisting of (1) light (650- 750 pounds), (2) medium (850-950 pounds), and (3) heavy (1050 to 1150 pounds) hot carcass weights. Surface temperatures from all weight categories reached levels below 4˚C within 24 hours of chilling. In the deep tissue (SM), Gluteus medius, and Longissimus dorsi carcass locations, differences in temperature between light versus medium and heavy weight ranges at the final hour of chilling (hour 28) were detected (P < 0.05). At hour 28, no differences (P ≥0.05) were detected among surface, deep pectoral, Psoas major, or deep chuck locations. At hour 28, light weight carcasses reached below the recommended chilling target of 7˚C in the deep tissue location; however, the medium and heavy range carcasses never declined below 7˚C. When larger carcasses are not chilled adequately, potential quality implications exist including reduced quality grades, increased carcass weight loss due to shrink, and fabrication issues. Therefore, beef processing facilities should consider sorting cattle before chilling in order to maximize the quality of the products being processed.Item Open Access Quality and price impacts on U.S. demand for lamb imports(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Ufer, Danielle Jayne, author; Countryman, Amanda, advisor; Bonanno, Alessandro, committee member; Delmore, Robert, committee memberThe U.S. lamb industry has changed in the last decade, potentially impacting the structure of the import industry, which has become necessary to meet domestic demand. Domestic production has continued to decline, consumer demographics have shifted to reflect a growing ethnic consumer population, and promotional efforts have been met with varying degrees of success. This work updates previous research to evaluate how changes in the industry may affect import demand using a differential production model approach, and extends the literature to evaluate the role of boneless/bone-in product differentiation in importer demand using an absolute price version of the Rotterdam model. Results indicate that the structure of the lamb import market has remained relatively consistent across the past three decades, even with the inclusion of an additional fifteen years of data. Importers appear to have become less responsive to changes in prices, with demand for all imports becoming more inelastic. Product differentiation is found to play an important role in import demand, with boneless and bone-in products showing evidence of separability. Source-specific association with different product qualities appear to be emerging, with preference for frozen lamb from New Zealand and chilled lamb from Australia, with frozen Australian lamb demonstrating shrinking influence within the market. Overall, as imports become essential to meet U.S. domestic demand for lamb, the boneless and bone-in imported lamb markets both display low variability in an increasingly inelastic lamb import market that has become more insensitive to price changes over time.Item Open Access Three essays on the inequality of household food security(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Zhou, Siwen, author; Berning, Joshua, advisor; Bonanno, Alessandro, committee member; Bayham, Jude, committee member; Miller, Ray, committee memberThis dissertation contains three essays on the inequality of household food security in the United States. In particular, the second chapter examines the effect of economic cycle, particularly unemployment, on the likelihood of food insecurity for different immigrant households in the United States relative to native US households. As unemployment is not randomly determined for households, we create a Bartik instrument by exploiting exogenous variation in industry shares across locations interacted with national industry growth rates to identify the disproportional effect of unemployment rate on food insecurity for immigrant households. The third chapter examines how immigrant households use time and money to manage their household food security relative to natives. To overcome the potential measurement errors and endogeneity of household level time-use and expenditures, aggregated cell-level means of food production time and expenditures are employed as instruments separately to identify the causal effects of time and money inputs on household food insecurity and how these effects vary across immigrant and native households. The fourth chapter seeks to elucidate the long-term structural nature of food security dynamics through household financial asset holdings in United States. By adopting an econometric strategy, this chapter uses a 19-years panel dataset from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (2001-2019) to establish the new the Structural Probability of Food Security (SPFS) measure for long-run study of food security dynamics.Item Open Access Three essays on wheat production efficiency in Iraq: comparison between MENA countries and internal comparison of districts(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Altaie, Karrar, author; Pritchett, James, advisor; Koontz, Stephen, committee member; Bonanno, Alessandro, committee member; Cutler, Harvey, committee memberWheat is an important staple of the Iraqi diet, as it is for all the nineteen Middle East North African (MENA) countries. Wheat is also an important crop for farmers in the rural areas of these countries. Yet, all the MENA countries import wheat, and the gap between growing demands and local supplies is widening. This gap is prompting general concerns of food security and driving interest in wheat productive efficiency. The focus of this dissertation is examining the technical efficiency of wheat production with a goal of informing policy decisions in Iraq. In this research, a conceptual approach of wheat productive efficiency is developed based on existing models and is translated into an empirical framework. The approach evaluates the relationships between different kinds of inputs such as human capital, financial capital, operational capital, imports and sociodemographic factors and the resulting wheat output. Inputs related to temperature, humidity and irrigation pattern also included. Technical efficiency (TE) scores and factors affecting TE are explored with two empirical methods: Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). These methods are applied in two essays: panel data exploring Middle East North African countries and a cross sectional data of wheat producing districts in Middle and South of Iraq. A third essay synthesizes the result of the two empirical explorations. In the first essay factors that affected productive efficiency are: • Human capital: population (positive relationship with wheat production per unit of land). • Operating capital: harvested area (negative relationship), number of tractors (negative relationship), number of harvesters (negative relationship), pesticides (positive relationship), urea (positive relationship), seeds (negative relationship). • Financial capital: net national income (positive relationship). • Import effect: imported quantity (negative relationship). Also, factors that explained variation in TE are: • Human capital: farmers with access to electricity (negative relationship), ratio of farmers population to urban population (negative relationship), extension specialist per 100,000 farmers (positive relationship), employment of female workforce within agriculture (positive relationship). • Financial capital: credit to farmers (positive relationship). • Energy used in agriculture effect: aggregated energy (negative relationship). • Other agricultural competing activity: Livestock density (negative relationship). • Politics effect: political instability (negative relationship). • Surface irrigation effect: availability of the flow of surface water (negative relationship). • Elevation effect: elevation (positive relationship). In the second essay, factors affecting technical efficiency are: • Human capital: ratio of farmers population to urban population (positive relationship). • Financial capital: producer price index (negative relationship). • Surface irrigation effect: distance to the flow of surface water (negative relationship). The SFA and DEA indicate contradictory results. This might due to the randomness in SFA the DEA does not incorporate. Average technical efficiency score for MENA countries adopting SFA equals 62% while it equals 97% when DEA is used. In the second essay, TE equals 63% while it equals 88% when DEA is adopted. Results obtained from essay 1 and essay 2 used to obtain policies showed in essay 3. Those policies may not only have their positive effect on increasing TE but also on enhancing yield per unit for MENA countries and Iraq in particular. Policies mentioned in essay 3 suggested a strong attention has to be paid to extension role in agriculture. Policy lever that Iraq can use to improve TE is investing in the quality of human capital through increasing the level of education for farmers.