Analysis of Determinants Affecting Organic Production: State Evidence from the United States
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear author(s),
Thank you for the manuscript. I can see a lot of hard work put into writing. However, there are few suggestions:
I) Some of the sentences are too long, making it complicated. Always follow KISS (Keep It Simple & Short) strategy. No more than 18 or maximum 25 words in a sentence.
II) Hypothesis 3 is very confusing. This needs improvement. Reduce the word and make it a statement (one liner) rather than complex paragraph.
III) There is error in the formatting. You need to proofread before submission. Line 346 reads summary and conclusion, which in actual is again written at Line 481.
IV). The findings should always been stated in the light of existing literature by either contradicting or supporting the work in the field.
V) Managerial implications shall be included.
VI) Good to see proper justifications in the different aspects. However, how did you ensure personal biases are controlled in the process? It should be incorporated.
Good luck.
Author Response
We would like to thank the reviewer for the very helpful comments. We have read through comments carefully and have made corrections in the revised manuscript. To make it easy for reviewer to review the changes that were made in the revised manuscript, we have listed all comments and then included our item-by-item responses to these comments.
- Some of the sentences are too long, making it complicated. Always follow KISS (Keep It Simple & Short) strategy. No more than 18 or maximum 25 words in a sentence.
Answer to Reviewer 1 Comment 1: We thank the reviewer for the insightful comments. According to KISS (Keep It Simple & Short) strategy, we modified the longer sentences in the manuscript. The modified contents can be found at Lines 25-26, 28 and 36 in the revised manuscript.
- Hypothesis 3 is very confusing. This needs improvement. Reduce the word and make it a statement (one liner) rather than complex paragraph.
Answer to Reviewer 1 Comment 2: We agree with reviewer that hypothesis 3 is confusing. Therefore, we simplified hypothesis 3 by integrating our predictions regarding positive and negative effects. The modified contents can be found at Lines 253-256 in the revised manuscript.
- There is error in the formatting. You need to proofread before submission. Line 346 reads summary and conclusion, which in actual is again written at Line 481.
Answer to Reviewer 1 Comment 3: We carefully checked the entire manuscript for typographic and formatting errors. We deleted the content “summary and conclusion, Results and Discussion” at line 346 of the manuscript. The modified contents can be found at Line 347 in the revised manuscript.
- The findings should always be stated in the light of existing literature by either contradicting or supporting the work in the field.
Answer to Reviewer 1 Comment 4: We thank the reviewer for this suggestion. According to the reviewer’s comment, we have provided more literature to contradict or support our findings. Some studies do not provide supporting evidence to the impact of USDA grant funding and the state approved funding on organic farming production. As far as the current literature is concerned, there is almost no literature on comparative analysis of macro level organic farming determinants, which highlights the contribution of this paper. The added literature and contents can be found at Lines 428-430, 444-446, 459-461, 464-467 and 485-486 in the revised manuscript.
- Managerial implications shall be included.
Answer to Reviewer 1 Comment 5: We thank reviewer for this suggestion. We added managerial implications in the fifth part of the article. The added literature and contents can be found at Lines 516-526 in the revised manuscript.
- Good to see proper justifications in the different aspects. However, how did you ensure personal biases are controlled in the process? It should be incorporated.
Answer to Reviewer 1 Comment 6: We thank the reviewer for pointing out this. Firstly, it is important to control personal biases in the empirical analysis, because variables containing personal biases may affect the development of organic agriculture in the regression. Second, personal biases such as age, gender and race are controlled in the model. See Table 1 for details. In order to make this part clearer, we have added more details at Lines 309-312.
Reviewer 2 Report
The topic of paper is very interesting and actual. The methods used in paper are relevant and prepared in a correct way. Statistical analysis is also suitable for research method but not sufficient in my opinion. Maybe one more method should be used to check to correlation between variables from table 1. Comparing all states with this data could be added value to this paper. The results are clearly presented. The references are quite actual however it can be improved to references with latest dates. The hypotheses were properly formulated and proven.
Author Response
Thank you for your comments. We really appreciate your efforts in reviewing our manuscript. We have revised the manuscript accordingly. To make it easy for reviewer to review the changes that were made in the revised manuscript, we have listed all comments and then included our responses to these comments.
The topic of paper is very interesting and actual. The methods used in paper are relevant and prepared in a correct way. Statistical analysis is also suitable for research method but not sufficient in my opinion. Maybe one more method should be used to check to correlation between variables from table 1. Comparing all states with this data could be added value to this paper. The results are clearly presented. The references are quite actual however it can be improved to references with latest dates. The hypotheses were properly formulated and proven.
Answer to Reviewer 2 Comment: Thank you for your comments, the discussion regarding these questions are presented following. For the first question, OLS regression is enough to test the correlation (Shen et al., 2019; Kim, 2020; Almasarwah, 2020) and we use U.S. state-level data in our model. For the second question, the dates of some references in the article have been updated. The modified contents can be found at Lines 299-301, 414 and 428-430 in the revised manuscript.
Reviewer 3 Report
The literature review is clear and comprehensive. The statements and conclusions are drawn coherent.
Overall the paper is very interesting.
Author Response
Thanks very much for reviewing this manuscript and we appreciate all your comments.
