Subsidizing Backyard Chickens?

There are a lot of really bad food policy proposals.  But, this one take the cake.  Apparently the city of Austin, TX is subsidizing backyard chicken coops.  

“The city announced Thursday that as a part of Austin Resource Recovery’s Home Composting Rebate Program, Austinites can attend one of five “chicken keeping classes,” buy a chicken coop, submit a rebate application online and receive a $75 check from the city.

Austin Resource Recovery is promoting the program as a way for Austinites to help reach the city’s Zero Waste goal by keeping food waste out of the landfill.”

A few questions come to mind.  What happens to the waste that comes out of the chickens?  Does this waste (and the smell and the sound) impose externalities on neighbors?  What happens to the hens who have reached the end of their egg-laying life?  What happens to the hens who, whoops, turn out to be roosters.  Bird flu?  Will the chickens be protected from preditors and extreme weather conditions?  How much does it cost to maintain the chickens and how expensive is supplemental feed and veterinary care?

I'm not necessarily trying to discourage backyard chickens.  I just want to know why taxpayer A should be required to pay for person B's chickens?  If the problem is food waste, and supposing it causes some unmentioned externalities, why not just increase the price of garbage pick-up?  Then households can respond in whatever ways they find most effective and convenient.  I doubt, for most, that chickens are the optimal solution.      

How Many Americans Go Hungry?

One of the most basic measures of well-being is whether people have enough food to eat. Whether the U.S. does well in this regard seems to depend on who you ask.  There are many people in the so-called food movement who seem to think we're doing ok on this front and that food is actually too cheap.  There are other groups like Feeding America that think hunger is a serious concern and are doing what they can to reduce it.

The USDA Economic Research Service produces the most widely used measure of hunger (or as they call it "food security").  According to their data: 

“An estimated 12.7 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2015, meaning they lacked access to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. That is down from 14.0 percent in 2014.”

This figure shot up during the great recession (reaching a high of 14.9% of households in 2011) but has subsequently fallen a bit as indicated above, but still remains higher than was the case prior to 2008 when it was regularly in the 10 to 11% range.  

I was curious how the sample of people I study every month in my Food Demand Survey (FooDS) matches up with these official government statistics.  In the most recent April 2017 edition of FooDS, we added some questions (the short 6-item measure) based on work by the USDA to measure food insecurity.  As an example, one of the questions is "'The food that I bought just didn’t last, and I didn’t have money to get more.' Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you/your household in the last 12 months?"

Data from FooDS reveals a strikingly high level of food insecurity - much higher than what the USDA reports.  According to the criteria outlined at the above link, we found a whopping 46.7% of respondents were classified as having low or very low food security (22.9% of the sample had low food security and 23.8% had very low food security).  

My first thought was that we must have made a mistake in how we asked the questions or in how we analyzed the data.  We ruled out those possibilities.  My second thought was that maybe my survey sample is really different from the U.S. population.  After all, who is willing to sign up to take online surveys?  Maybe people who really need the money and who are thus more likely to be food insecure.  But, this couldn't be the complete answer because I use weights to force my sample to match the U.S. population in terms of age, education, gender, and region of residence, and the average income of my sample isn't much different from the average income of the country as a whole.  Maybe the difference is that I used a 6-item measure of food insecurity rather than the full 18 items used by the USDA (but previous research has found strong agreement between the two).

When I mentioned this quandary to my friend Bailey Norwood, he knew immediately what was causing part of the the discrepancy, and I think it could have a big impact on how we fundamentally view the food security measures reported by the USDA.  

In short, the USDA assumes that if you make enough money you can't be food insecure [*Addendum, this original sentence, as stated, was too strong. As the quote below suggests, you can't be classified as food insecure if you're high income AND if you answer two preliminary questions on food insufficiency in particular way.  Some researchers in this area emailed me to note that about 25% of food insecure households have incomes at least 300% of the poverty line]. In their latest report, they indicate in footnote 5: 

“To reduce the burden on higher income respondents, households with incomes above 185 percent of the Federal poverty line that give no indication of food-access problems on either of two preliminary screening questions are deemed to be food secure and are not asked the questions in the food security assessment series. ”

What if I take my FooDS data and just assume anyone that has an income that puts them at 185% of the poverty line (based on these criteria) is food secure despite the answers they gave on the survey? (note: my calculations are crude because I only measure household income in wide $20,000 ranges and I simply assign people to the midpoint of the income range they selected).   

When I do this, I find that now "only" 22% are classified as having low or very low food security (9% of the sample had low food security and 13% had very low food security).  That's still a lot higher than what the USDA reports, so maybe my internet survey still has some sample selection issues.  However, it's still HALF the original measure.

What does this mean?  There are a lot of relatively high income people that would be classified as food insecure if the USDA simply asked them the same questions as everyone else.  There are a lot of relatively high income people that say "yes" to questions like "In the last 12 months, did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn't enough money for food?"  

None of this to say that income isn't a determinant of food security, but that it shouldn't be the only signal, particularly if someone is in a lot of debt or if they have large households, they could still be going hungry.

In any event, here are some of the demographic characteristics of the people who, according to my sample (and without making the above discussed income correction), classify as being food secure, low food security, or very low food security.  

As the above table indicates, income matters as the average income of food secure households is $86,000/year.  However, households with low food security still average $60,000/year, which is far above 185% of the poverty level for most households.

Households that classify as very low food security are much more likely to be on SNAP (aka food stamps).  Of course, this isn't causal: being on SNAP isn't causing food insecurity but likely the other way around.  Two other noteworthy results.  Households classified as having very low food security are much more likely to 1) have children in the household and 2) report farming or ranching as a primary occupation.  

Food Demand Survey (FooDS) - April 2017

The April 2017 edition of the Food Demand Survey (FooDS) is now out. 

A few comments on the regular tracking portion of the survey:

• Willingness-to-pay for all meat products (except deli ham) fell from March to April.
• WTP for pork chops reached the lowest point in the almost four-year history of food.  
• Comparing April 2017 to April 2016, only WTP for hamburger is higher than was the case a year ago.
• Awareness of bird flu in the news fell this month and concern for bird flu as a food safety issue experienced the smallest increase of any of the issues studied.  Awareness and concern for animal welfare issues rose this month.

We added several new ad-hoc questions to the survey this month.  

There has been a lot of discussion in the news about whether hydroponics should be able to be labeled organic.  We put the question to our participants.  They  were asked: “Do you think hydroponic vegetables should be allowed, under certain conditions, to be labeled organic? (note: hydroponic vegetables are grown without soil - their roots grow in water with added nutrients and minerals)” 

About 46% of participants stated “yes”, hydroponic vegetables should be labeled organic, 24% said “no”, and the remaining 29% said “I don’t know”.   It should be noted that due to a glitch in survey administration, only 250 people answered this particular question and as such, the sampling error is higher than usual (it is +/-6% rather than the usual +/- 3%).

A couple weeks ago, I discussed some research we'd conducted studying when consumers don't want to know about certain agricultural production practices.  We followed up on this research in this month's edition of FooDs.  We were interested in whether people actively sought to avoid information they may find undesirable.  

We split people into two equal sized groups.  Those in the first group were asked: “On the next page you have two choices of what to see.  You can either see a picture of how pregnant hogs are housed on a typical farm or a picture of a blank screen.  Which do you prefer?”

To check whether people simply preferred to see a blank screen in general, respondents randomly allocated to the second group were asked a similar question but instead of the option to see a picture of “how pregnant hogs are housed on a typical farm”,  they could choose between “a picture of a nature scene or a picture of a blank page.”

Fifty four percent said they wanted to see the picture of how pregnant hogs are housed.  By contrast, 46% preferred instead to see a blank page.  Thus, slightly less than half the sample actively chose to ignore free information about hog housing.  Those who preferred to see the blank screen were less concerned about farm animal welfare as a food safety risk (mean of 3.2 vs. 3.6 on the 5-point scale of concern) and placed less relative importance on animal welfare as a food value (mean of -0.116 vs. -0.097). 

Ninety one percent of respondents choose to see the nature scene.  Overall, the results suggest just about half the respondents preferred not to know how pregnant hogs are housed. 

Finally, we added some questions about food insecurity.  I'll discuss these in a separate post.   

Craig Gundersen on Food Stamps

Last week, the Washington Post ran an interview with the agricultural economist Craig Gundersen on the food stamps program (officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).  Craig has been researching this topic for decades and has a lot to say - much of which runs against what we regularly read in the media.  

Here's one little snippet:

“So maybe people aren’t selling their EBT cards — but could they buy groceries with benefits and then sell them for cash? I hear from readers, for instance, who say they see people buying baby formula and reselling it.

There’s a couple things going on here. The first thing, with infant formula — I think they are probably thinking about the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). Theoretically, you could have someone who doesn’t tell the WIC person they’re breastfeeding so that they still get infant formula. But those are totally separate programs. Sometimes people lump the two things together.

With respect to SNAP — I can’t make sense of that, from a rational standpoint. Presumably, in this scenario, people are buying groceries with SNAP and then reselling those groceries at a lower price than what they cost in the store. Most off-SNAP purchases are inframarginal, meaning that they spent more than their benefit amount on food. So if someone sold their benefits, they would be giving up the opportunity to purchase food, and would have to purchase food with other funds.

The only group of people who this might make economic sense for are those who are not inframarginal — meaning they only spend $100 per month on food and they get $120 per month in SNAP benefits. They could sell that extra $20 of food they get on benefits. But even if that was happening, it would be such a small proportion of people. Who cares?”

The whole thing is worth a read.

Solar Radiation and Crop Yields

My last post discussed some recent research we conducted on the impacts of biotechnology adoption on corn yields.  A reader forwarded a link to a recent paper in the journal Nature Climate Change raising an issue I hadn't yet heard about.  Using some simulations, the authors argue that increased solar radiation, which led to brighter skies, has had a big impact on recent increases in corn yields.  

Here's the abstract:

“Predictions of crop yield under future climate change are predicated on historical yield trends, hence it is important to identify the contributors to historical yield gains and their potential for continued increase. The large gains in maize yield in the US Corn Belt have been attributed to agricultural technologies, ignoring the potential contribution of solar brightening (decadal-scale increases in incident solar radiation) reported for much of the globe since the mid-1980s. In this study, using a novel biophysical/empirical approach, we show that solar brightening contributed approximately 27% of the US Corn Belt yield trend from 1984 to 2013. Accumulated solar brightening during the post-flowering phase of development of maize increased during the past three decades, causing the yield increase that previously had been attributed to agricultural technology. Several factors are believed to cause solar brightening, but their relative importance and future outlook are unknown, making prediction of continued solar brightening and its future contribution to yield gain uncertain. Consequently, results of this study call into question the implicit use of historical yield trends in predicting yields under future climate change scenarios.”

I don't know enough about the issue to speak to the credibility of the authors' findings.  However, I not sure that this is much of a confound for our study on biotech adoption because our estimated effects are (partially) identified by using variation in yields across states that have differential adoption rates (and yet are presumably exposed to the same solar radiation).  To the extent that identification our effects of biotech adoption come about from comparisons of yields in the same counties over time (where solar radiation varied over time), this could be an issue, but again, the time trend included in our models should pick up this effect as well.