Large-scale farming good?

The New York Times is slated to run a piece I wrote in the Sunday edition.  

Here's a snippet:

“Large farmers — who are responsible for 80 percent of the food sales in the United States, though they make up fewer than 8 percent of all farms, according to 2012 data from the Department of Agriculture — are among the most progressive, technologically savvy growers on the planet. Their technology has helped make them far gentler on the environment than at any time in history. And a new wave of innovation makes them more sustainable still.”

Working with the Times editors, I pulled together the following figure to illustrate the great strides being made in agriculture.  

Here's the conclusion:

“There are no easy answers, but innovation, entrepreneurship and technology have important roles to play. So, too, do the real-life large farmers who grow the bulk of our food.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Which other government programs are us fat?

A few days ago, I took on the claim that farm subsidies are making us fat (the answer is most likely "no").  However, there are other government programs that potentially affect food prices - what about those programs?  Have they contributed to the rise in obesity?

A new paper in by Julian Alston, Joanna MacEwan, and Abigail Okrent in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy asks whether funding for agricultural research and development (R&D) can explain the rise in obesity.  The chain of logic goes like this: there is extensive evidence that funding for agricultural research increases productivity; higher productivity means getting more food using fewer resources; more food means lower food prices; more food at lower prices means more food intake; more food intake leads to obesity.  Ergo, government funding for agricultural research leads to obesity.  

So what did the authors find?  They found that agricultural R&D spending probably did have a modest effect on obesity rates, but that R&D also resulted in enormous benefits to consumers and producers.  The authors write:

“Our analysis of historical counterfactuals suggests that it would have been very expensive to have foregone past R&D-induced productivity growth, even if in doing so we were able to reduce obesity and related healthcare expenditures.”

And, if we had undone the R&D efforts that led to the food price changes since the 1980s:

“This would be a costly reversion; it would cost consumers $65.01 billion, of which only $4.72 billion would be offset by savings in public healthcare costs, to reduce average U.S. adult body weight by 4.85 lbs. This translates to a cost of $55.6 per pound after the savings in public healthcare costs are taken into account.”

In summary:

“The implication is that agricultural R&D policy is unlikely to be an effective policy instrument for reducing obesity, both because the effects are small and because it takes a very long time, measured in decades, for changes in research spending to have their main effects on commodity prices. Moreover, as our results and others have shown, the opportunity costs of reducing agricultural research spending in the hope of eventually reducing the social costs of obesity would be very high because agricultural research yields a very large social payoff.”

Having now discussed the effects of farm subsidies and agricultural research, what about programs like the government-sanctioned check-off programs?  That was the topic of a session at the most recent AAEA meetings in Boston.  Parke Wilde from Tufts and Harry Kaiser from Cornell debated the role of check-off programs and their role in affecting public health and nutrition.  I was unfortunately unable to attend the session, but Parke offered a preview of it on his blog.  I hope to see some research on this topic in the near future.  

10 Year Anniversary of Omnivore's Dilemma

Blake Hurst, a farmer from Missouri, takes stock of the changes in cultural views toward food in the 10 years since the publication of Michael Pollan's highly influential, Omnivore's Dilemma. 

Here's one bit that typifies some of the clash between the views of the food movement and those of a conventional farmer.

“Anybody who has followed the food movement over the last decade knows that corn is the serpent in the garden, the root of all evil, the original sin of industrialized agriculture. The writers and intellectuals who have changed the way we think about food and farming have seen the corn plant colonize, as they put it, an additional 25,000 square miles, an area almost the size of West Virginia. That’s got to hurt, if you like to eat artisanal kale in overpriced restaurants in Berkeley.

As a practical matter, agriculture has remained much the same because we farmers do what we do for good reasons. We use chemical fertilizers because people have to eat, and we can’t produce enough food without the help of commercial nitrogen fertilizer. We use chemical compounds to control weeds and insects because it’s the only way to do that without handing a hoe to millions of Americans every summer. We change corn into human food through animals (we eat the animals that eat the corn) and in food-processing factories that use corn products, because when it comes to changing changing sunshine to calories, corn is the most efficient plant known to man”

Hurst wraps up as follows:

“When it first hit the best-seller list in 2006, Pollan’s book was perfect for the times, laying out a series of challenges for the nation’s leading industry. He has changed how we think about food, increased scrutiny of those who provide that food, and spawned a growing and well-compensated cadre of chefs, documentary makers, food entrepreneurs, and other self-proclaimed food experts who are always ready with a quote or a Twitter hit about the dangers of modern food production. He hasn’t done much to change the way I farm, but he’s certainly changed the way farmers communicate with eaters.

Others will have to decide whether we’re better off for all of these changes. For farmers like me, the food movement has made life a little harder; it’s made me more conscious of how the decisions I make appear to others. I spend more time talking to people who are curious but uninformed about my industry. We now all talk like Pollan, but, a decade on, we still like a good hamburger or a perfectly prepared steak.”

There are a number of good points in the article.  Read the whole thing here.

Adaptation to Climate Change

I ran across this fascinating paper by Richard Sutch on the the relationship between the Dust Bowl and hybrid corn adoption.  The discussion is interesting in light of current discussions bout how and whether farmers will be able to adapt to climate change and whether technology development can help mitigate some adverse effects.

Here's a passage from Sutch.

“The suggestion that I make in this chapter is that the severe drought of 1936 revealed an advantage of hybrid corn not previously recognized— its drought tolerance. This ecological resilience motivated some farmers to adopt hybrids despite their commercial unattractiveness in normal years. But that response to climate change had a tipping effect. The increase in sales of hybrid seed in 1937 and 1938 financed research at private seed companies that led to new varieties with significantly improved yields in normal years. This development provided the economic incentive for late adopters to follow suit. Because post- 1936 hybrid varieties conferred advantages beyond improved drought resistance, the negative ecological impact of the devastating 1936 drought had the surprising, but beneficial, consequence of moving more farmers to superior corn seed selection sooner than they might otherwise.”

This long quote is from the conclusions and is well worth reading.

“The sociologists Bryce Ryan and Neal Gross, writing in 1950, studied the diffusion of hybrid corn in two communities located in Greene County, Iowa (Ryan and Gross 1950). In their view, late adopters were farmers bound by tradition. They were irrational, backward, and “rural.” The early adopters by contrast were flexible, calculating, receptive, and “urbanized.” “Certainly,” they summarized, “farmers refusing to accept hybrid corn even for trial until after 1937 or 1938 were conservative beyond all demands of reasonable business methods”. They drew a policy implication: “The interest of a technically progressive agriculture may not be well served by social policies designed to preserve or revivify the traditional rural- folk community”. In part, this view was based on Ryan and Gross’s (incorrect) belief that hybrid corn was profitable in the early 1930s. I have suggested that this was not the case. Figure 7.11 should also give pause to the view that rural laggards delayed the adoption of hybrid corn. It would be hard to argue that the farmers in Iowa Crop Reporting District 6 were predominantly forward-thinking leaders, attentive, and flexible, while those in Indiana and Ohio were predominately backward rustics trapped by inflexible folk tradition.

I think an implication of this study is that farmers (even those of rural America in the 1930s) are remarkably resilient and adaptive. Sudden and dramatic climate change induced a prompt and prudent response. An unexpected consequence was that an otherwise more gradual process of technological development and adoption was given a kick start by the drought and the farmers’ response. That pushed the technology beyond a tipping point and propelled the major Corn Belt states to the universal adoption of hybrid corn by 1943. The country as a whole reached universal adoption by 1960.”

The paper has a number of interesting discussions about the role of the USDA, federal research, and strong personalities that pushed along the development of hybrid corn.  For more on the history of the development of hybrid corn, see this previous post.

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.