Blog

New findings on agricultural productivity

The American Journal of Agricultural Economics has recently published several new and important papers on agricultural productivity.  Whether agriculture is becoming more or less productive is a critical question as it relates to sustainability (are we getting more while using less?), food security (can food production outpace population growth?), and consumer well-being (are food prices expected to rise or fall?). 

These papers focus on "total" or "multifactor" productivity rather than just yield.  Yield is a partial measure of productivity - it is the amount of output per unit of one input: land.  One can increase yield by adding more of other inputs such as water, fertilizer, labor, etc.  What we want is a measure of how much output has increased once we have accounted for uses of all inputs, and this is total or multifactor productivity.

The first paper by Matthew Andersen, Julian Alston, Phi Pardey, and Aaron Smith is worrisome.  They write:

In this paper we have used a range of data and methods to test for a slowdown in U.S. farm productivity growth, and the evidence is compelling. The results all confirm the existence of a surge and a slowdown in productivity but with some variation in timing, size, and statistical significance of the shifts. ... Over the most recent 10 to 20 years of our data, the annual average rate of MFP [multifactor productivity] growth was half the rate that had been sustained for much of the twentieth century. More subtly, and of equal importance, the past century (and more) of statistics assembled here suggest the relatively rapid rates of productivity growth experienced during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s could be construed as aberrations (along with the relative rapid rates of growth experienced during a period spanning WWII), with the post-1990 rates of productivity growth now below the longer-run trend rate of growth.

The second paper by Alejandro Plastina and Sergio Lence provides a deeper understanding behind the causes of productivity growth.  They present a straightforward way to decompose multifactor productivity into six different factors: technical change, technical efficiency, allocative efficiency, returns to scale, output price markup, and the input price effect.    They write:

Technical change is the major driver of TFP growth over the long run, and there is evidence that technical progress in the 1990s and 2000s was much slower than in the 1970s. This is a relevant result for policy makers, and begs the question of what is actually causing the slowdown in technical change. This is the first study to show technical regress in the agricultural sector during the farm crisis of the 1980s.

Another novel result is that annual changes in TFP bear no significant correlation with annual rates of technical change but instead are highly correlated with the markup effect, followed by the returns to scale component and allocative efficiency change. These findings suggest that evaluating the effects of research, extension, and other variables on each of the components of our measure of TFP change (rather than solely on an aggregate TFP index) can shed light on the actual channels through which those variables affect agricultural productivity growth in the United States and therefore contribute to policy design.

Finally, there is Julian Alston's fellow's address from last year's AAEA meetings.  In addition to providing an excellent literature review, he makes several important points.  He argues that agricultural research is significantly under-funded relative to the benefits it provides in increased productivity:

Evidence of remarkably high sustained rates of social payoffs to both private and public investments in agricultural R&D testify to a significant failure of government to fully address the underinvestment problems caused by the market failure. Moreover, if anything, in high-income countries like the United States, agricultural R&D policies seem to be trending in the wrong direction, making matters worse.

and

a reasonable first step would be to double U.S. public investment in agricultural R&D—an increase of, say, $4 billion over recent annual expenditures.4 A conservatively low benefit-cost ratio of 10:1 implies that having failed to spend that additional $4 billion per year on public agricultural R&D imposes a net social cost of $36 billion per year—an order of magnitude greater than the annual $1–5 billion social cost of $20 billion in farm subsidies.

Alston also points out that the main beneficiaries of productivity growth are consumers, and the farmers may or may not benefit.  He writes:

It seems inescapable that the agricultural innovations that made food much more abundant and cheaper for consumers did so to some extent at the expense of farmers as a whole—more than offsetting the effects of growth in demand for output from the sector. This finding is reinforced when we pay attention to the details of the timing. Specifically, the periods of the most rapid decline (or slowest growth) in [net farm income] seem to coincide with the periods of most rapid increase in farm productivity—the 1940s to 1980s, especially 1950–1980, as identified by Andersen et al. (2018)—consistent with the hypothesis that agricultural innovations have reduced net incomes for U.S. farmers as a group.

This suggests something of a paradox.  Farmer groups have often been some of the biggest supporters of agricultural research and are proponents of productivity growth, while consumers have been skeptical if not hostile toward many productivity-enhancing technologies on the farm.  Yet, it is likely food consumers that have received the lion's share of the benefits from increases in agricultural productivity through greater food security and lower food prices.  

Wizards and Prophets

I've been reading Charles Mann's latest book Wizards and Prophets, which was released earlier this year.  Overall, I've enjoyed the book.  The subtitle, "Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World" is an apt description for much of the content, which describes food, agricultural, and environmental problems through the lens of Norman Borlaug and William Vogt.  The history is informative, and Mann gives a fair comparison of the underlying philosophical differences, which he attributes to Borlaug and Vogt, driving much of the debate today around food, agriculture, and the environment. 

I am very much in the "Borlaug-wizard camp" (which advocates for innovation, science, research to solve food security and environmental problems) but I came away with a better appreciation for the Vogt-ian, prophet point of view (focused on resource constraints, ecological limits, need to reduce consumption, etc).  

While I thought the book was well done and well worth reading, Mann gets one aspect of this debate wrong.  Because I've seen other writers make the same mistaken point, it's worth delving into a bit.

Throughout the book, Mann refers to the Borlaug way of thinking as "top down" and the "hard way," and he contrasts this with Vogt's approach which he depicts as "bottom up", "localized", etc.  This is exactly backward. 

Mann aptly describes a core belief among the prophets: that there are finite resources on earth and just like any other species, we will grow exponentially until we exhaust our resources, and then our population and civilization will collapse. The analogy is a jar filled with few fruit flies given a fixed amount of food.  Initially, the flies have ample resources and they multiple rapidly.  However, at some point the population becomes too large for the fixed food supply, and the population collapses.  The fruit fly population follows something like an S-shaped curve over time.

Moving from flies to people, the issue is typically described in a Malthusian manner.  As the graph below shows, as we add more labor to a fixed amount of land, diminishing marginal returns kick in and the amount of food available per worker eventually falls.

malthus1.JPG

If this resource-constrained view is a core belief, how do you solve the problem?  Adherents to this point of view typically urge folks to consume less or use less resource-intensive systems/products or to constrain population in some way.  But, most individuals don't want less.  Particularly folks in the developing world - they want to have and consume the things those us in the developed world enjoy, whether it be meat, air conditioning, ipads, or MRIs.  Yes, persuasion may result in a few people cutting back, but not on a scale that matches the magnitude of the problem.  Thus, the only fully effective way for the prophets to accomplish their goal (preventing catastrophic collapse) is to force or constrain the population to adopt outcomes few individuals would choose on their own.  Thus, the call for policies to mandate a cap on the number of children one can have (as occurred in China), restrictions of resource use, taxes, bans, etc. In other words, top-down planning is required to constrain growth and population, which is often manifested in "one size fits all" or highly non-localized policies.  Just recall of all the clamoring by Vogt-type adherents when Trump decided to pull out of the Paris accord that had global (i.e., non-local) prescriptions to fight climate change [note: I'm not advocating for or against the Paris accord, only noting that it is non-local and more-or-less top-down).  

The wizardly Borlaug view, by contrast, operates via entrepreneurial innovation and individual decisions of whether to adopt or not.  When Borlaug worked for the Rockefeller foundation, he/they had no "power" to force individual farms to adopt their new seeds and production practices, rather as Mann himself reveals, the early Mexican adopters took on the new seeds precisely because they saw for themselves via Borlaug's demonstration plots that they could achieve higher yields.  Yes, the types of seeds and production practices developed by Borlaug et al. spread far and wide, but it is was largely because they "worked" not because it was mandated from on high.  And, the adoption was much more adapted to local conditions than Mann lets on.  Producers in different locations ultimately used different varieties, different irrigation and fertilization techniques, etc.  As time has gone on, precision agriculture has led to even more localization of management decisions.  

The promise and hope of the Wizard is that innovation can get us off the curve shown in the graph above and move us to a new, higher outcome, as shown below. 

malthus2.JPG

This isn't a denial of resource constraints, it is a recognition that innovation allows us to get more with the same or fewer or even different resources.  But, for those innovations to be adopted, they must pass the market test.  Real life-farmers and consumers need to choose to adopt them (or not). This is precisely the opposite of top-down.

Here's what I wrote a while back when Nassim Taleb referred to GMOs as a "top down" technology. 

Taleb makes reference to the Hayek bottom-up vs. top-down planning. He says GMOs are the top-down sort. I’m not so sure. Real life farmers and people have to be willing to buy varieties that have the GMO traits. No one is forcing that outcome. It is true that competition will limit - to some extent - the diversity of plants and genetics that are observed because some plants aren’t tasty or aren’t high enough yielding. But most plant breeders keep all kinds of “ancient” varieties precisely for the purpose of trying to breed in new traits to today’s varieties (and folks working on synthetic biology are creating their own, new strands of DNA, creating new diversity). Geography also increases diversity. Iowa grows a lot of corn, Oklahoma doesn’t because it isn’t our comparative advantage. I see little reason to believe that a single GMO variety will perform well in all locations. So, yes individual companies are planning and creating new varieties, but it is all our local knowledge of what works in our places and conditions that determine whether particular genetics offered by a particular company are used. We do not have a seed czar or a DNA czar.

How to Feed the World

That's the title of a new book edited by Jessica Eise and Ken Foster that was just released last week.  The book is a collection of essays primarily from my colleagues in the Department of Agricultural Economics here at Purdue, but it includes contributions from Purdue faculty in other academic disciplines as well.  I had the privilege of writing the afterward.  

Here is the table of contents:

Chapter 1. Inhabitants of Earth- Brigitte S Walforf
Chapter 2. The Green, Blue, and Gray Water Rainbow- Laura C Bowling and Keith A Cherkauer
Chapter 3. The Land that Shapes and Sustains Us- Otto Doering and Ann Sorensen
Chapter 4. Our Changing Climate- Jeff Dukes and Thomas W Hertel
Chapter 5. The Technology Ticket- Uris Baldos
Chapter 6. Systems- Michael Gunderson, Ariana Torres, Michael Boehlje, and Rhonda Phillips
Chapter 7. Tangled Trade- Thomas W Hertel
Chapter 8. Spoiled, Rotten, and Left Behind- Ken Foster
Chapter 9. Tipping the Scales on Health- Steven Y Wu
Chapter 10. Social License to Operate- Nicole J Olynk Widmar
Chapter 11. The Information Hinge- Jessica Eise
Chapter 12. Achieving Equal Access- Gerald Shively

eisebook.JPG

Disruptive Trends in Food and Agriculture

In the past couple weeks, I've had several opportunities to engage with some forward looking farmers and agribusiness executives, and a common theme seems to have emerged around many of the conversations: what are the issues or food and agricultural technologies on the horizon that could be potentially disruptive for the current incumbents?  

1) Block chain technology.  This isn't bitcoin, but rather the underlying technology that facilitates bitcoin trades, which could be applied to many other industries.  This Reuters article from earlier in the week, for example, indicates, "A cargo of U.S. soybeans shipped to China has become the first fully-fledged agricultural trade conducted using blockchain."  The thought is that blockchain technology might prove to be a mechanism that can more rapidly disseminate many types of information about trades (the Reuters article mentions the "sales contract, letter of credit and certificates") more widely and rapidly.  Big players like Walmart and IBM are also talking about using blockchain to improve traceability and food safety.

2) Plant-based and cellular-based protein.  This is a topic I've written about many times in the past (e.g., here or here).  What's changed is the high level of investment flowing into this space, including by companies like Tyson and Cargill.  Moreover, there are now products from companies like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, JUST, and others that are actually in the market.  If sales ramp up, what are the impacts on producers of current animal feeds (primarily corn and soy)?  What are the new agricultural inputs for these plant-based meat/egg/dairy alternatives? 

3) CRISPR.  Again, the basic science isn't necessarily new,  but there are new applications coming on board (non-browning apples, hornless Holsteins, etc.) and potential changes in the regulatory landscape that could accelerate (or decelerate) adoption and consumer acceptance.

4) Agricultural analytics.  This includes precision agriculture, sensing, big data, drones, modeling, etc.  Yes, these have been around for a while and there have been many discussions about data ownership and rights, but there is a sense that the data and technology have moved to a point where some adopters may be able to start gaining a competitive advantage. 

5) Online food buying.  Will Amazon do to the food supply chain what they've done in other industries?  Walmart is also making big moves into this space.  What are the implications for traceability, tracking, and vertical market coordination?

6) Trade.  Agricultural trade has a big impact on US agriculture, and it appears there may be changes in trade policy on the horizon. 

What have I missed?

Are Steaks Too Big?

Then answer, according to a paper just published in the journal Food Policy by Josh Maples, Derrell Peel, and me is "yes" - at least for most consumers.  

The issue is that improved genetics and feeding technologies, along with various economic incentives, have led to much larger cattle.  To provide some perspective, USDA data indicate that the average weights of commercially slaughtered cattle hovered around 1,000 lbs from the 1950s and the mid 1970s.  Since that time, however, there has been a fairly steady increase in the size of cattle.  Since 1975, finished cattle weights have increased about 9 lbs/year on average.  In 2016, the average weight was 1,363 lbs.  That's a whopping 366 lbs higher in 2016 than in 1975!

Larger cows mean larger steaks.  On the surface, that seems like a good thing for consumers as it means we have more steaks.  However, most people don't want to eat a 32oz steak.  In fact, most restaurants and grocery stores offer relatively fixed serving sizes for steaks like 12oz or 16oz, for examples.  So, what happens if cattle carcasses have gotten much bigger, and along with it, the muscles that are cut into steaks, but consumers still only want a 16oz steak?  The consequence is that today, steaks are cut thinner.  Thus, the core question is: for a fixed weight, do consumers prefer "traditional" thicker steaks that take up a smaller area or "newer" thinner steaks that take up a larger area?  

To answer this question, we surveyed over 1,000 US consumers and presented them with a series of choices like the following that varied the type of steak, the thickness or the steak, the area of the steak, and price.  Note that one you know the thickness and the area of a steak, the weight is pre-determined.  

 

steakCE.JPG

The findings?

Our results imply that consumers are heterogeneous in preferences for steak size but are generally in unison in their dislike for the thinnest cuts of steaks

About half the consumers preferred steaks with the largest area, but about half preferred steaks with a medium-sized area.  Overall, the results suggest that the roughly 50% of consumers who prefer steaks with larger areas is way more than offset by the near universal dislike of steaks becoming much thinner.   

Here's an excerpt from the conclusion:

The decrease in consumer welfare by moving from a choice set containing small area and thick steaks to a choice set that includes large area and thin steaks implies that the changes in carcass size have led to a decrease in consumer utility from today’s steak choices relative to the steak choices of a few decades ago. The aggregate welfare loss from the increase in carcass weight with respect to ribeye and sirloin steaks is $8.6 billion for the two largest classes. Of course, steaks are only one piece of the carcass, and the increase in carcass size may have increased welfare with respect to other beef cuts. The decrease in welfare due to larger steaks can be offset by increased welfare resulting from the increases in quantity produced of other cuts. Ground beef is a prominent example. Because the form of this product remains generally unchanged as carcass size increases, the increased efficiency (i.e. more meat per animal) has likely led to increases in consumer welfare through lower prices (or smaller increases in prices resulting from the decrease in number of cattle slaughtered). However, steaks represent an important portion of the total carcass value and it is possible that the increasing size of other cuts have also created less desirable end products for consumers. Future research should focus on the impact of increased carcass weights on consumer welfare across multiple cuts. Such studies might find that while welfare losses exist for some cuts, the gains in welfare from other cuts lead to a net increase in consumer welfare due to larger cattle.