The Atlantic on Agricultural Fertilizer

Over at the Atlantic, Alex Fitzsimmons has an article on a vastly under-appreciated technology: synthetic fertilizer.   Fitzsimmons notes concerns about excess fertilizer application and reliance on fossil fuels, but he also weights that against the fact that we have forestalled the dire Malthusian concerns.

Fitzsimmons quotes me as saying:

“Pessimists like Malthus and Ehrlich consider people a self-destructive drain on nature, but as Lusk, the Oklahoma State University agricultural economist sees it, “they underestimated the ability of humans to adapt and innovate and make productive use of the resources we have available.””

Its nice to see some attention paid to this subject in the popular press. In any event, you can read the whole thing here.

The Future of Meat

If you haven't yet heard of the Breakthrough Institute, it is time you did.  They're bringing a fresh approach to thinking about environmental and food issues - one that isn't anti-technology, anti-growth, or anti-markets, and that is focused on improving the lives of the poor among us.  

The Breakthrough Institute is in the midst of releasing a series of articles on the future of food.  The latest article in their series is one on the future of meat by Marian Swain.  After discussing some of the environmental challenges with meat production, Swain is able to see through all the popular prognostications to get to the heart of the problem:

“conversations about mitigating this impact have focused on two strategies: convincing people to eat lower on the food chain and shifting meat production toward more extensive systems. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the former may not prove particularly practical, while the latter may not always bring about better environmental outcomes, particularly at global scales.”

Advocates of "convincing people to eat less meat" are right in one sense.  Eating meat isn't necessary.  Many people can live a perfectly healthy life without needing to eat meat.  We also don't need to drive cars, use electric light bulbs, type on our laptops, or have children.  But, we are immensely better off having these things in our lives.  The trick is to consume the things we want while trying to be responsible about it.  Swain, however, turns the table on perceptions of "responsible" by noting that intensive forms of production often come at a lower environmental cost than the extensive forms (e.g., free range, grass fed, etc.) so often favored by environmentalists.   

Swain documents the trends in consumption of meat products in different parts of the world over time.  When thinking about environmental outcomes, however, it is useful to focus on the number of animals rather than just the number of pounds or kilograms consumed.  The reason is that environmental impacts are more correlated with numbers of animals than numbers of pounds, and when it comes to animal welfare, animal well-being is experienced one brain at a time.  

As the graph below shows, we now have many fewer cows in the U.S. than we once did (for a broader discussion, see this article I wrote for the journal Animal Frontiers) 

The figure reports the ratio of the total beef production in a given year to the inventory of all cows and heifers (2 yr old and older) for the same year. The change is dramatic.  For each cow and heifer in the US, in 2012 an additional 217 lbs of beef was produced as compared with 1970 (a 50% increase). Meanwhile, the number of cows per capita has fallen by about 47%. Remarkably, 4.4 billion more pounds of beef were produced in 2012 than in 1970 despite the fact that there are now 9.5 million fewer cows and heifers. In a New York Times article, I pointed out that we would need 15.3 million more cows (not counting the additional heifers, stockers, and feedlot cattle) to produce the amount of beef Americans actually ate in 2015 if we were instead using 1950s technology.  For dairy, we'd need another 30 million cows to produce the amount of dairy products we enjoyed in 2015 if we were instead getting only 1950s yields.  The dramatic increase in productivity, brought about by changes in genetics, management, and other technologies, has given us more of want we want (meat and dairy) with fewer resource-using, methane emitting animals.  

One of the concerns in all this is the impact on animal welfare.  Yet, the tradeoffs are difficult.  Beef cattle have higher land requirements, lower feed efficiency, and higher carbon-equivalent emissions than pork and poultry.  Yet, a good case could be made that animal well-being is higher for beef cattle than for pork and poultry.  (And "no" it isn't the case that animal welfare is uniformly better or worse at small vs. large farms).  A key challenge for the future is in identifying how to realize the gains in efficiency and reductions resource use brought about by intensification without unduly sacrificing animal welfare or the price consumers pay for food.  As I discussed in my latest book, Unnaturally Delicious, there are innovate housing systems and creative markets that are attempting achieve these compromises.

Swain mentions another solution - lab grown meat.  As I discussed in Unnaturally Delicious, I'm a fan of this bovine-in-a-beaker approach.  But, it isn't a free lunch.  Lab-grown cell have to eat something.  And they produce waste.  The high costs of producing lab grown meat suggest the process currently uses many more resources than old-fashioned animals, but advances in technology may one day reverse that equation.  Whether people actually want to eat a lab grown burger is a different story and my surveys suggest the new burgers will face an uphill battle in terms of consumer acceptance.  Time will tell.

Regardless of whether we get meat from a lab, from a cow, or from a chicken, it is important to recognize science and technology as a path to improve environmental outcomes and animal welfare.  As I put in in a Wall Street Journal editorial on the subject:

“Let us also not gloss over what is beef’s most obvious benefit: Livestock take inedible grasses and untasty grains and convert them into a protein-packed food most humans love to eat. We may be able to reduce our impact on the environment by eating less meat, but we can also do the same by using science to make livestock more productive and environmentally friendly.”

Why do people waste food?

The author and celebrity chef Dan Barber had an op-ed yesterday in the New York Times that touched on food waste.  Oddly, he seems to associate waste with large-scale specialized agricultural grain operations.  In fact, these are the crops that are most easily stored and transported, and it is these larger farms that have easier access to storage facilities and technologies to prevent waste.  

In any event, I'd say Barber's editorial is fairly representative of the larger literature on food waste.  That is to say, food waste is seen as something akin to a "sin" or to a "mistake" that we must stop at any cost.  Take for example, this quote from a National Geographic article:

“Ethically, food waste is bad. ”

I suspect most economists have a hard time with this sort of reasoning.  The decision to discard food is a decision like any other economic decision.  Deciding to discarding food is "bad" only to the extent that there is some sort of market failure.  To be sure, there may be some un-priced externalities associated with waste, but these aren't often well articulated by advocates of food waste reduction.  Even still, it isn't the decision to discard that is "bad", what is "bad" is the lack of a market to price the externality.

A useful starting point is to go back to first principles and understand the economic factors that "reasonably" or "rationally" lead people to discard food in the first place.  That is precisely what Brenna Ellison and I have tried to do in a new short paper that was just published in the journal Applied Economics Letters.

The paper constructs a mathematical model of consumer behavior based on the notion that people take prices and wage rates as given and then choose how much time to spend working, how much time to spend in food preparation, and how many raw food ingredients to buy so as to maximize their well-being (which is defined by the meals they eat and the amount of time in leisure).  In this so-called household production model, consumers are also producers: they combine their time with raw food inputs to produce meals, which are the ultimate source of value for the consumer.

It is actually hard to conceptualize "waste" in a model like this (or any economic models of optimization).  I've heard heated debates between some of my fellow agricultural economists over this matter, and there is a camp that would argue (quite persuasively I might add) that there is no such thing as waste.  In that view "waste" really would represent a mistake or an arbitrage opportunity.  If someone valued my trash more than I did, they ought to be willing to pay to take it from me; if no one does, then (as I actually do) I pay someone else to remove it, who finds no other economical use for it other than to bury it and let nature take its course.  In this more strident view, we might "discard" items, but a well functioning economy doesn't "waste" items.  

All that is to say, in a mathematical model like ours, one has to have some way of defining waste.  We define it as the the inverse of the amount of meals produced per unit of raw food input.  A cynic might say: you've just redefined the marginal productivity as raw food inputs as waste.  Guilty as charged.  If you have a better solution, I'm happy to hear it.  

In any event, this set-up allows us to view waste as a function of economic variables.  We show that:     

“Differences in market prices for raw food ingredients, p, or differences across food
consumers in the opportunity cost of their time, w, might thus explain differences in food waste. It is also possible that education, background, or cooking ability can lead to different marginal productivities of time used in meal preparation. ”

The nice thing about this approach is that one can also assume that people combine their time and food inputs to produce other things (in addition to meals) like human capital or health.  If so, it is also possible to show that if consumption of a meal lowers health (e.g. by consuming a spoiled or raw ingredient), a larger amount of waste might be optimal.

If one is willing to accept some assumptions about the mathematical relationships involved, the model produces some testable hypotheses.  Namely:

• individuals with higher wages will have more food waste,
• individuals with higher non-wage income will have less food waste,
• individuals with greater talents/ability/education at turning raw food inputs
  and time into meals will waste less,
• the amount of waste will depend on the extent to which people prefer leisure to meals.

Importantly, in this framework waste is not a "mistake" nor is it "unethical" - it is the best thing for the consumer to do given their income, prices, and preferences.  For waste to be a "bad", my decision to discard food would have to affect other people not involved in my decision.  One could imagine situations like this and this sort of frameworks provides a starting point for thinking about costs and benefits of policies and initiatives aimed at reducing waste.

I'll conclude by noting that even the Onion knows there are "rational" reasons to discard food that aren't "bad" or "unethical".  Here are few of their humorous suggestions to cut down on food waste.

“Avoid impulse buying by only going to the grocery store for one ingredient at a time.

Hire an impoverished family to sit at your dinner table and guilt you into eating every last morsel.

Make sure to eat the oldest items in your fridge first, as listeria will deter you from additional grocery purchases for the next seven to 10 days.

Instead of buying a whole tub of strawberries and an entirely new can of whipped cream, use the remaining half can of tomato paste, last serving of chicken piccata, or whatever other leftovers you have in the fridge to spice up your love life.

Try not to prepare more food than you can eat, unless you are entertaining the Lady Carroway for supper and must impress her with your bounty.

Make use of expired food by reaching out to any neighborhood kids who can be dared to eat it for a few bucks.”

Pew Survey on Consumers, GMOs, and Trust in Science

About a week ago, the PewResearchCenter released a new report (report summary here) on GMOs, organic, and trust in food science.  The report has already been covered quite a bit in the media, but I thought I'd share a few observations on the study's headline results.  

First, the study finds:

“Four-in-ten Americans (40%) say that most (6%) or some (34%) of the foods they eat are organic. ”

It's hard to know what to make of this claim as "some" is a pretty loose category.  One important point to keep in mind here is that USDA data reveal that, except for a few exceptions like lettuce or carrots, for most foods the percent of production that is is organic is typically far less than 5%. 

The study also finds:

“The minority of U.S. adults who care deeply about the issue of GM foods (16%) . . . are also much more likely to consider organic produce healthier”

The finding is consistent with prior research showing that WTP for organic is heavily influenced by the desire to avoid pesticides and GMOs.  In fact, there was a lot of attention given to the organic industry's support of the new mandatory labeling law for GMOs, which allowed disclosure via relatively innocuous QR codes.  The organic industry has worked to make sure people know non-GMO is not synonymous organic.  In other words, these two attributes (organic and non-GMO) are likely demand substitutes for consumers, and the organic industry knows this.  

One of the highlighted conclusions from the study is:

“The divides over food do not fall along familiar political fault lines. ”

I'm not so sure.  While I agree things like concern for GMOs or preferences for organic don't have strong correlations with political ideology, the same can't be said for people's desires to regulate GMOs (say via labels or bans) or subsidize organics .  See, for example, this paper entitled "The political ideology of food" I published in Food Policy in 2012. From the abstract:

“Food ideology was related to conventional measures of political ideology with, for example, more liberal respondents desiring more government involvement in food than more conservative respondents . . .”

As I've written about in the past, I think it is important to separate "food preferences" from "policy preference", and on this last issue, there are big partisan and ideological divides.   

Much of the news coverage I saw about the report focused on the results related to American's trust in scientists and GMOs.  The study reports

“Americans have limited trust in scientists connected with genetically modified foods.”

 The study also reveals only about half the respondents think scientists think GMOs are safe to eat.  Well, Pew's other research shows us that it is more like 88%.  Thus, people under-estimate scientists beliefs about the safety of GMOs.  One might think then, that the answer is to just tell people about the scientific consensus regarding GMOs.  However, my research with Brandon McFadden suggests this probably won't have much affect.  In our study, the biggest determinant of how an individual responded to information about the science on GMOs was their prior belief about the safety of GMOs.  In fact, about a third of the people who thought GMOs were unsafe prior to information said they thought GMOs were even more unsafe after receiving statements from the National Academies of Science, the American Medical Association, etc. indicating GMOs were safe (we called these folk "divergent"); the plurality of people who thought GMOs were unsafe just ignored the scientific information indicating GMOs were safe.  This behavior is a form of motivated reasoning that Dan Kahan has discussed extensively in his work on cultural cognition.  We look for the information that supports our prior beliefs and ignore or discount the rest.  

On this issue of trust in scientists and GMO foods: it is important to note that trust in virtually ALL institutions is down over time.  Gallup has been tracking trust in about a dozen institutions since the 1970s.  Aside from a few exceptions (like the military and police), trust is way down for most institutions.  For example over 65% of people had a great deal or a lot of trust in "church or organized religion" in the 1970s, whereas today the figure is 41%.  For "public schools", confidence was running about 60% in the mid 1970s, but today is only 30%.  Newspapers went from around 40% to now around 20%.  "Big business" from around 30% to now around 18%.   "The medical system" from 80% to 39%.  Similar trends exist for congress, the presidency, organized labor, banks, and so on.   

As a result, it is important to ask how much trust is there in scientists . . . compared to what?  I haven't asked this question specifically in regard to GMOs in particular or food science in general, but a while back I asked on my monthly Food Demand Survey (FooDS):  “How trustworthy is information about meat and livestock from the following sources?” Fifteen sources were listed (the order randomly varied across respondents), and respondents had to place five sources in the most trustworthy category and five sources in the least trustworthy category. A scale of importance was created by calculating the proportion of times a meat and livestock information source as ranked most trustworthy minus the proportion of times it was ranked least trustworthy.

We found:

“The USDA and FDA were reported as most trustworthy with 50% more people indicating the source as most trustworthy than least. A University professor from Harvard were seen as slightly more trustworthy than one from Texas A&M, but both were viewed as less trustworthy than interest groups like the Farm Bureau, the CSPI, or the HSUS.

News organizations, and particularly food companies, were viewed as least trustworthy. Chipotle was the seen as the least trust worthy organization studied – the restaurant chain was placed in the least trustworthy category 69% more often than in the most trustworthy category.”

While individuals scientists at either Harvard or Texas A&M were less trusted than some others perhaps it was because it was phrased a single professor rather than a group of professors.  Indeed, the four top groups are all collections of scientists (among other people).  A subsequent survey asked how much people knew about each of these individuals and institutions, and while CSPI is trusted, it isn't well known.  I suspect people were responding to the word "science".  So, I think there is good reason to suspect people trust scientists as much or more than other societal institutions.

The issue of trust and acceptance of GMOs has been researched quite heavily in the academic literature (e.g., see several studies by Lynn Frewer).  In this paper,  she and coauthors show that people's response to information on GMOs doesn't depend on how much they trust the source per se, but rather it's the other way round: people trust the sources giving them the information that fits with their prior beliefs.  So, again we're back to motivated reasoning.  Still, we should acknowledge some research that shows "information matters."  I've done work on this topic, as has Matt Rousu, Wally Huffman and Jason Shogren.  This last set of researchers show, for example, that relatively uninformed people are influenced by information by interested and third party sources.

There is a lot more in the Pew report, but I think I'll leave it here for now.

Farm Size and Animal Welfare

When I published this piece in the New York Times a couple months ago arguing the large farms can, and often are, good for the environment, one of the most common comments/criticisms I received was something along the lines of: "well surely this isn't true for 'factory farms' and animal welfare."  It has been hard to say much about this because the evidence was limited on relationship between farm size and animal welfare.  However, I was recently alerted to this new review article published in the Journal of Animal Science by a group of researchers at the University of British Columbia.  

Among their many conclusions are these:  

“Farm size and animal welfare exhibit no consistent relationship”

and

“Our review does not support the contention that there is a consistent relationship between farm size and welfare on dairy farms or, indeed, other times of livestock farms. Moreover, the differences that do exist are unlikely to be caused directly by size but by other factors associated with size such as economic viability, staffing level, awareness of and exposure to emerging issues, and access to resources (e.g. time, capital, expert consultants, scientific information, etc.)”