Most economic demand today manifests itself in report charts and news as a change over time. But traditional economic supply and demand curves do not have time in...Read More
Outer space is now open for business. On February 22, 2024, a private company space vehicle, Intuitive Machines landed on the Moon. The first manned U.S. lunar landing...Read More
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...Read More
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...Read More
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...Read More
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...Read More
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...Read More
There was a time, not so long ago, when agribusiness referred to a farm input-providing business. This was readily translated into everything involving goods and services that revolved...Read More
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...Read More
Local markets are defined in more than one way. This adds unexpected confusion to a simple term like, ‘local’. Mathematicians have a definition for local that adds clarity....Read More