Essays on horn fly control economics in stocker cattle, stocker cattle producer purchasing preferences, and food insecurity during COVID-19

Abstract

Horn flies cause extensive economic loss to cattle. The efficiency of two insecticides to controll horn flies, Corathon® and LongRange®, and the profitabilities that stocker cattle producer could expect to achieve were evaluated. A total of 302 stocker cattle records from Kansas were analyzed. Both treatments were effective compared to the control group, adding $17-$18 profit per head. The cattle treated with LongRange® had the fewest horn flies and best average daily gain, but LongRange®'s higher treatment cost made its net profit similar to Corathon®'s.

The stocker industry plays a critically important role in the cattle industry and is the most flexible and complicated segment of the beef supply chain. It is useful to analyze the factors that affect Stocker producers' calf purchasing decisions. Selected data from a recent survey, the '2017 Oklahoma Beef Calf/Stocker Movement Survey' was used to 1) test the independence of relationships between important demographic information and the nine factors reflecting stocker operator's purchasing preferences; and 2) apply a latent class model to the stocker producer population to classify producers into subgroups based on cattle purchasing preferences. Oklahoma stocker producers were divided into four latent classes according to purchasing preferences using latent class analysis.

With the pandemic of COVID-19 and lower employment rates and household income, food insecurity issue arises worldwide which should be considered and measured. Since the measurement of food insecurity by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was not administered until December of 2020. The impact of pandemic on food insecurity cannot be monitored. some expedited internet surveys were administered by organizations to attempt to measure food insecurity in pandemic, such as the Covid Impact Survey that is conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. The food insecurity rates for three separate weeks in the spring of 2020 from the NORC survey that mimicked the screening procedure of the CPS-FSS survey were reported. Meanwhile, food insecurity rates were compared across the 2008 Crisis, Pre-COVID, and COVID-19 with the same screening procedure.