The Economist on the Future of Agriculture

The Economist magazine seems to have taken a page out of Unnaturally Delicious.  Their quarterly technology issue focuses on agricultural innovations.

A few excerpts: 

“MICROBES, though they have a bad press as agents of disease, also play a beneficial role in agriculture. For example, they fix nitrogen from the air into soluble nitrates that act as natural fertiliser. Understanding and exploiting such organisms for farming is a rapidly developing part of agricultural biotechnology. . . .The big prize, however, would be to persuade the roots of crops such as wheat to form partnerships with nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria. These would be similar to the natural partnerships formed with nitrogen-fixing bacteria by legumes such as soyabeans. In legumes, the plants’ roots grow special nodules that become homes for the bacteria in question. If wheat rhizomes could be persuaded, by genomic breeding or genome editing, to behave likewise, everyone except fertiliser companies would reap enormous benefits.”

More robots may hit the farm.

“A truly automated, factory-like farm, however, would have to cut people out of the loop altogether. That means introducing robots on the ground as well as in the air, and there are plenty of hopeful agricultural-robot makers trying to do so.

At the University of Sydney, the Australian Centre for Field Robotics has developed RIPPA (Robot for Intelligent Perception and Precision Application), a four-wheeled, solar-powered device that identifies weeds in fields of vegetables and zaps them individually. At the moment it does this with precise, and precisely aimed, doses of herbicide. But it, or something similar, could instead use a beam of microwaves, or even a laser. That would allow the crops concerned to be recognised as “organic” by customers who disapprove of chemical treatments.

For the less fussy, Rowbot Systems of Minneapolis is developing a bot that can travel between rows of partly grown maize plants, allowing it to apply supplementary side dressings of fertiliser to the plants without crushing them. Indeed, it might be possible in future to match the dose to the plant in farms where individual plants’ needs have been assessed by airborne multispectral cameras.”

There is a lot of other interesting discussion in the piece about CRISPR, indoor farming, drones, soil sensors, precision agriculture, improved photosynthesis, fish farming, animal welfare, lab grown meat, and more.  

Who moved my corn?

I have the great pleasure of giving a talk this week at the annual meeting of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (AARES).  Tonight they held their awards ceremony, and I happened to be sitting next to Phil Pardey from the University of Minnesota who won (along with Jason Beddow) one of the research awards for a paper they published in the Journal of Economic History titled "Moving Matters".  

This is a fascinating paper that documents the movement of corn production over time in the US.  The paper illustrates the impact of hybrid and then genetically modified corn influencing what can be grown and where.  Changes in genetics and management practices allowed the corn plant to move  to soils that best suited the production of the crop.  As a result, they calculate that upwards of 21% of the growth in corn production can be explained by the geographic movement of the crop.   The results have implications for assumptions about impacts of climate change (i.e., that farmers can adapt by moving which crops, and which genetics, are planted where in response to changing temperatures) and for arguments about local foods (i.e., the sustainable production of crops depends on location of production, and allowing farmers to specialize in the geographic production of a crop can dramatically increase production).  

Here's the abstract:

“U.S corn output increased from 1.8 billion bushels in 1879 to 12.7 billion bushels in 2007. Concurrently, the footprint of production changed substantially. Failure to take proper account of movements means that productivity assessments likely misattribute sources of growth and climate change studies likely overestimate impacts. Our new spatial output indexes show that 16 to 21 percent of the increase in U.S. corn output over the 128 years beginning in 1879 was attributable to spatial movement in production. This long-run perspective provides historical precedent for how much agriculture might adjust to future changes in climate and technology.”

And, an interesting graph:

Thinking about risk

Consider this passage from a recent New York Times article

“Mr. Portier, who led the center when the revision process was initiated, said he believed parents should have been presented “with enough information to say caution isn’t ill advised, because we really don’t know, and there are enough indicators to say we should be cautious.””

The quoted former CDC official is espousing a form of the precautionary principle.  What do you think he's referring to? GMOs?  A new pesticide?  Food irradiation?

Nope. He's talking about cell phones.   The article describes some squabbles at the CDC on whether using cell phones cause cancer (the same World Health Organization group that says bacon and the weed-killer glyphosate may be carcinogenic  have also said that cell phones are a possible carcinogen), and how to communicate with the public on the issue.

So, here he have an issue for which there is apparently some scientific uncertainty, for which some government officials want the public to proceed only with caution, and the the public response?  A big shrug.  

Why is it that people think about the risks surrounding cell phones so differently than they do the risks surrounding GMOs, glyphosate, irradiation or many other food and agricultural technologies?  One could write a whole paper on that topic.  In fact I have (along with Jutta Roosen and Andrea Bieberstein).

There are a variety of reasons.  For one, people tend to conflate benefits and risks.  If something is beneficial then, people tend to think of it as less risky (even though we can imagine some very beneficial products that are also risky).  People directly see the benefits of using cell phones every day and thus they are perceived as less risky than, say, a pesticide that they have never heard of and scarcely can imagine  using.  Then, there is the old risk perception literature that originated with folks like Paul Slovic that is still relevant today.  The idea is that risk perceptions aren't driven by objective probabilities of possible bad outcomes but by how familiar or unusual a product seems and by how much control we believe we have over the risk.  Cell phones seems relatively safe because they're now quite familiar and because we decide whether to pick it up or turn it off.  Many food and agricultural technologies, by contrast, seem foreign and have secretly been slipped into our food supply (or so the story goes; ever notice now many of the top-selling food books use words like "hidden" or "secret" in the subtitles?).  

Whether there are good reasons for these psychological biases is less clear, particularly when they run at odds with the best scientific evidence we have on relative risks.  I for one, am perfectly at ease eating a tortilla made from Roundup-Ready corn while chatting on my cell phone.  The biggest risk is probably getting salsa on my iPhone.      

The Science of Taste

This article by David Owen in National Geographic is chock full of interesting tidbits on the science of taste and flavor.  

For example, why many kids hate broccoli?

“The aversion to bitter foods is inborn too, she said, and it also has survival value: It helps us avoid ingesting toxins that plants evolved to keep from being eaten—including by us.”

The idea that many of us were taught as kids - that there are taste buds on different parts of the tongue that signal different flavors - is flat wrong:

“It’s true that in some people the receptors for particular tastes may be more concentrated in certain areas on the tongue, but all of them are found all over, and a Q-tip dipped in lemon juice will seem sour no matter where you dab it. (The receptors sit on the surface of taste cells, which are bundled together in taste buds.)”

and

“Although the tongue map doesn’t exist, there may be a taste map in the brain . . .”

That is, taste is about more than what hits our tongue.  

“Taste receptors alone don’t produce tastes; they have to be connected to taste centers in the brain. In recent decades scientists have discovered receptors identical to some of those on the tongue in other parts of the body, including the pancreas, intestines, lungs, and testes. We don’t “taste” anything with them, but if, for example, we inhale certain undesirable substances, the bitter receptors in our lungs send a signal to our brains, and we cough.”

Interestingly, most chefs are taught very little about the science of taste and flavor.

“Stuckey teaches a course at the San Francisco Cooking School called “The Fundamentals of Taste.” “Most culinary schools don’t teach students how to taste before they start to cook,” she said. “They jump right in with, like, knife skills. But how can you possibly start an education around food without the building blocks of flavor?” She and her students do an exercise in which they make barbecue sauce. Most of the ingredients she provides are ones you would guess: tomato sauce, tomato paste, sugar, honey, liquid smoke, paprika. But there’s also a tray of ingredients whose predominant taste is bitter: coffee, cocoa, tea, bitters. “It’s not really intuitive, because you don’t think of barbecue sauce as bitter, but if you taste it before and after you add a bitter ingredient, you realize that bitter changes the whole gestalt”

All these complex interactions make it tough when we decide to vilify an ingredient - say sugar or fat - because ingredients have complex interactions in term of smell, taste, mouth feel, etc.  In fact,, we can trick our brain into thinking something is sweeter than it actual is:

“Bartoshuk told me that increasing the concentration of sweetness-enhancing volatiles in certain foods may make it possible to reduce their sugar content without making them taste less sweet. But she worries about unintended consequences. “As soon as we can produce a sweet experience that has no calories, isn’t toxic, and has no nasty characteristics—what will that mean for the brain?””

The whole thing is interesting.  

(HT Bailey Norwood)

Impacts of Agricultural Research and Extension

About a month ago, I posted on some new research suggesting decline rates of productivity growth in agriculture.  Last week at a conference in Amsterdam, I ran into Wally Huffman from Iowa State University, and knowing he's done work in this area, I asked him if he had any thoughts on the issue.  As it turns out, along with Yu Jin he has a new paper forthcoming in the journal Agricultural Economics on agricultural productivity and the impacts of state and federal spending on agricultural research and extension.  

Jin and Huffman also find evidence of a slowdown in productivity growth, writing: 

“We find a strong impact of trended factors on state agricultural productivity of 1.1 percent per year. The most likely reason is continued strong growth in private agricultural R&D investments. The size and strength of this trend makes it unlikely for average annual TFP growth for the U.S. as a whole to become negative in the near future. However, for two-thirds of the states, the forecast of the mean ln(TFP) over 2004-2010 is less than trend. The primary reason is under-investment in public agricultural research and extension in the past. For public agricultural research where the lags are long, it will be impossible for these states to exceed the trend rate of growth for TFP in the near future.”

They also find large returns to spending on agricultural research, and even larger returns to spending on extension.  They find the following:

“For public agricultural research with a productivity focus the estimated real [internal rate of return] is 67%, and for narrowly defined agricultural and natural resource extension is over 100%. Stated another way, these public investment project could pay a very high interest rate (66% for agricultural research and 100% for extension) and still have a positive net present value. Hence, these [internal rate of return] estimates are quite large relative to alternative public investments in programs of education and health. In addition, there is no evidence of a low returns to public agricultural extension in the U.S., or that public funds should be shifted from public agricultural extension to agricultural research. In fact, if any shifting were to be recommended, it would be to shift some funds from public agricultural research to extension. ”

The paper includes a couple really interesting graphs on research spending and extension employment over time.  First, they show that for four major agricultural states, real spending on agricultural research peaked in the mid 1990s. 

And, while extension staff has declined in some states, it hasn't in others.