Pre-conference Tour

"Extension Agricultural Education Tour"
sponsored by the Extension and Agribusiness Economics and Management sections

TIME: Saturday, July 23
8:00 am - 5:30 pm
FEE: $80

Rhode Island is an urban state with an important coastal area. The tour will feature both of these features. The tour will begin with a drive to Point Judith on the southern coast. Point Judith is the leading commercial fishing port in the state and also an important U.S. port. A walking tour will explore the port and the industry structure. Participants will see different fishing vessels that use different techniques. Fishermen will be available on two of the vessels to discuss their businesses. Rhode Island Sea Grant Extension will organize and lead this tour.

The remainder of the tour will be visits to three farms in the area between Point Judith and Providence. The overall theme for these visits is the challenge and opportunity for farms in an urban environment. One farm has dairy production, and another is a turf farm. The third is a diversified horticultural farm growing nursery stock, vegetables and other products; they also have diversified marketing at wholesale and retail levels. Participants will learn about production, marketing, and other management functions on these farms. The Rhode Island State Division of Agriculture is organizing the farm tours. For more information, see the tour Web site at http://www.arec.umd.edu/aaeatour/.

"Michael Porter and the Economics of Industry Clusters" sponsored by the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center

Dr. Michael Porter, Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, Harvard University's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, is a leading authority on competitive strategy and the competitiveness and economic development of nations, states, and regions. This pre-conference workshop provides an introduction to industry clusters as applied to agriculture with a focus on Porter's work; describes examples of industry clusters in agriculture through a series of case studies which have been commissioned for this workshop; discusses the implications of industry clusters with regard to public policy; and discusses whether these clusters have developed in response to industrialization. The cases include the wine industry, biotechnology, bio-pharmaceuticals, and organizational innovation. Each case will include an industry speaker that works in that cluster, a policy expert that discusses how that cluster developed in response to policies designed to encourage the development of that cluster, and the case writer.

"Agricultural and Rural Finance Markets in Transition" sponsored by the Center for Farm and Rural Business Finance and Farmdoc at the University of Illinois

The rapid changes in rural financial markets are impacting many discipline areas within agricultural economics. This session coordinated the top specialists in agricultural finance, industry, regulators, and specialists in other discipline areas to discuss the research and outreach landscape impacted by changes in rural financial markets. The session should help formalize the groundwork for new research and extension programs for the next decade. The overall objective of this pre-conference workshop is to coordinate a future research and outreach framework related to financing rural America across multiple discipline areas of agricultural economics.

"Simulation for Risk Analysis"
sponsored by the Agricultural and Food Policy Center in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University

An introduction to risk analysis and simulation using Simetar©, an add-in for Excel, is being offered as a pre-conference workshop. In class, problems will be used to demonstrate and teach the following topics: making an Excel spreadsheet model stochastic, estimation of parameters for parametric and non-parametric probability distributions; simulation of univariate probability distributions; simulation of multivariate normal and non-normal probability distributions; hypothesis tests for validation of simulated distributions vs. historical data; presentation of simulations results using PDF charts, CDF charts, Box Plots, Normality charts, and Stop Light probability charts; risk ranking using stochastic dominance and stochastic efficiency with respect to a function, and estimation and probabilistic forecasting of multiple regression models. Participants will be provided a one year license to Simetar© and a User's Manual. Computers are not provided, so each participant must bring a Windows-based microcomputer with Excel. Simetar© will be sent to participants before the conference so it can be installed prior to the pre-conference workshop. Instructors for the simulation pre-conference workshop are James Richardson, Keith Schumann, and Paul Feldman, the developers of Simetar©. Registration for the workshop is limited to 40.