ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the estimates of random variability of prices, yields, and incomes associated with several crops and livestock for the late nineteenth century. To be specific, because all variability measures are derived from state time series data, it can be shown that the estimated variance of the random element for crop yields is a lower bound estimate of the true variability faced by an individual farmer. The justification for the use of the measures of absolute and relative variability is straightforward. Southern crops, overall, generally ranked in the middle or lower level of income variability. Gross income random variability coefficients for corn in the major producing states were quite low. The variate difference method separates the systematic component from the random component by successive finite differencing. Thus, the procedure consists of calculating the variance of the original series and for each of the series of successive finite differences.
