This book focuses on three essential elements of agricultural supply chains: Planting and Growing, Processing and Selling, and Government Interventions. For decades, most agricultural economists applied macro-economic theory in decisions pertaining to the optimization of food production and distribution. However, few researchers used micro-economic theory to examine how individual farmers respond to market information, incentive pricing mechanisms and different market structures in the trade of agricultural goods. Examining challenges in agricultural supply chain operations through the lens of micro-economic theory is imperative because it can enable policymakers and social enterprises to develop and design market information provision policy, incentive contracts and market structures for improving farmer and consumer welfare.In each chapter, contributing authors motivate their research questions by providing the context and articulating the importance of their questions.They present their analysis to examine the respective research questions and explain their results. At the end of each chapter, they provide a short list of future research questions.

This book focuses on three essential elements of agricultural supply chains: Planting and Growing, Processing and Selling, and Government Interventions. For decades, most agricultural economists applied macro-economic theory in decisions pertaining to the optimization of food production and distribution. However, few researchers used micro-economic theory to examine how individual farmers respond to market information, incentive pricing mechanisms and different market structures in the trade of agricultural goods. Examining challenges in agricultural supply chain operations through the lens of micro-economic theory is imperative because it can enable policymakers and social enterprises to develop and design market information provision policy, incentive contracts and market structures for improving farmer and consumer welfare.

Part A: Planting and Growing.- Chapter 1: Dynamic Crop Allocation in the Presence of Two-Season Crop Rotation Benefits.- Chapter 2: Agricultural Production Planning under Yield-Dependent Cost and Price.- Chapter 3: Mechanisms for Effective Sharing of Agricultural Water Between Head-Reach and Tail-End Farms.- Chapter 4: Portfolio Management Issues in the Commercial Seed Industry: A Modeling Framework and Industry Implementation.- Part B: Processing and Selling.- Chapter 5: Procurement Management in Agricultural Commodity Processing.- Chapter 6: The Influence of Yield-Dependent Trading Costs on Pricing and Production Planning under Supply Uncertainty.- Chapter 7: Capacity Management in Agricultural Commodity Processing.- Chapter 8: A Prescriptive Model for Selling Wine Futures to Mitigate Quality Uncertainty.- Chapter 9: Wine Analytics: Futures or Bottles.- Part C: Government Interventions.- Chapter 10: Implications of Farmer Information Provision Policies: Heterogeneous Farmers and Market Selection.- Chapter 11: Agricultural Market Information: Economic Value and Provision Policy.- Chapter 12: Knowledge Sharing among Smallholders in Developing Economies.- Chapter 13: Policy Interventions for an Agriculture-Based Malaria Medicine Supply Chain.- Chapter 14: The Impact of Crop Minimum Support Price on Crop Production and Farmer Welfare.- Chapter 15: Input- vs. Output-Based Farm Subsidies in Developing Economies: Farmer Welfare and Income Inequality.