Nearly 25 years ago, I was asked to evaluate the economic opportunity for growing industrial hemp in my role as economist for the American Farm Bureau Federation. I wrote one rather concise report and distributed it to all the state … Continue reading →
Fifty years ago, in 1974, the definition of a U.S. farm for the purposes of collecting data in the Census of Agriculture, was set at $1,000 of farm value of production. This includes gross sales or potential sales. The Ag … Continue reading →
Abraham Lincoln commissioned the first census of farm by the Department of Agriculture 180 years ago. Some of the data categories have not changed since then, like specifying a farm of 1 to 9 acres in size. As a culture, … Continue reading →
The 2022 Census of Agriculture was released on February 13, 2024. This image is the top of the first table, Table 1, in the 750-page data document on summary data in the United States for the production year, 2022. In … Continue reading →
From the archives of fun papers I have written, this one from when I was a manure economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation in 2001. We had been working through the politics of manure production and use with the … Continue reading →
In the old days, agribusiness referred to a business providing farm inputs. This broadly impacted everything involving goods and services connected to agricultural commodities. Commodities are the raw products from crops and livestock that cannot be differentiated on product quality. … Continue reading →
Local and global markets for ag and biomass products are two distinct markets that are interdependent. They are two parts of the same system. It is a ‘both and’, rather than ‘one or the other.’ One of these unique markets … Continue reading →
Local markets are defined in more than one way which distracts from agreement on the value of local markets. In calculus, local maxima, are defined as a relative measure rather than an absolute boundary. No explicit boundary is defined. Local … Continue reading →
As a quantitatively trained, free-market economist, I had been shaped to believe buying ‘local’ was a preference that was not cost-effective. But as I grew into a manure visionary and biomass systems economist, bulky and wet materials of limited value … Continue reading →
What? This is what biomass systems economists do. We add value to goods and services in value attributes that go beyond having a price in dollars. Most of my economist colleagues are brilliant price analysts. I am a manure visionary … Continue reading →
