THE ECONOMICS OF CLEANING WINTER-WHEAT FOR EXPORT - AN EVALUATION OF PROPOSED FEDERAL CLEAN GRAIN STANDARDS

Buyer complaints about poor quality U.S. wheat have led to proposals t o enforce minimum dockage standards for exports. An economic-engineeri ng approach is used to evaluate costs and benefits of cleaning wheat i n order to meet these standards for 13 possible cleaning configuration s. These results are used in an optimization framework to estimate cos ts and benefits of cleaning all U.S. export wheat. The estimates indic ate that cleaning U.S. export winter wheat to .35% dockage would cost an average of 1[/bu., requiring an initial capital investment of $28 m illion. Value of wheat lost in cleaning is a significant cost that pre viously has been overlooked.