Agricultural Economics最新文献

Diversification of income sources is one of the most common strategies households employ to minimize household income variability and to ensure a minimum level of income that guarantee their food security. This study examines the impact of livelihood diversification on farm profits among smallholder rice farmers in the Central Luzon Region (CLR) of the Philippines using long-term farm-level panel data spanning from 1966 to 2016. We employed a random-effects ordered probit model to investigate the drivers of livelihood diversification and then used the mixed Markov chain model to analyze the transition of households from less to more diversified livelihoods and its impact on farm profits over time. Our findings reveal substantial diversification among households over time. In particular, the elevation of the farm location is a key driver of rice farm households’ probability to diversify. The estimates show that an increase in the latitude of the farm location increases the probability of rice farmers in the CLR to diversify. We find that 64% of the rice farm households constitute farmers for whom diversification can be a strategy for survival. For medium- to high-profit farm categories, diversification tends to protect farmers against farm profit losses arising from adverse climatic and weather variability.

Considering the consumption-induced intensification of global challenges and the continuously changing consumer needs, it is important to understand the drivers of consumer food choices under external pressures. We applied best–worst scaling to elicit the relative importance of 11 food values and conducted latent class cluster analyses based on individual scores, allowing us to gain insights into distinctive consumer segments. Data were collected through online surveys of 1000 consumers in Bavaria, southern Germany, in November 2020 and November 2022. As expected, the relative importance of food value price has strongly increased during this period. Similarly, the price-sensitive segment has become larger in 2022 than in 2020, while the societal impact-centered segment has become much smaller in 2022. These findings call for target-specific measures to counteract this trend of increasing price focus that challenges sustainable dietary transitions.

Genebanks serve as both providers of valuable traits for breeding programs and repositories of diverse crop genetic material representing society's agricultural heritage. In this study, we use a Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism to elicit the willingness-to-pay of rice farmers in Côte d'Ivoire for small amounts of African rice (Oryza glaberrima) landraces held by the genebank of the Rice Biodiversity Center for Africa, and for seed of newly developed ARICA rice varieties bred using genebank materials. Using a field experiment, we additionally investigate how randomized exposure to and experimentation with small amounts of African rice landrace seed or seed of advanced rice varieties developed by AfricaRice affect how smallholder rice farmers value these novel genetic resources. Surprisingly, we find that farmers generally value having access to African rice landraces at approximately the same level as for advanced rice varieties (and far above market rates for improved seed), and that those farmers who grew landrace seed in the offseason were willing to pay more than those who did not. Our results demonstrate the additional value provided by the conservation of African rice landrace varieties (apart from their use in breeding) and highlight the importance of experimentation in the adoption process.

Many financial markets use designated market makers (DMMs), but the impacts of DMMs on agricultural futures markets – and in particular, how to arrange DMMs among contracts expiring in different months – are largely neglected. In 2017, Chinese exchanges started recruiting DMMs for inactive contracts when they become nearby contracts to address the discontinuous trading activity of nearest-to-maturity contracts, which enables us to study the benefit and cost of recruiting DMMs for inactive contracts using a quasi-experimental framework. Leveraging tick-by-tick data on corn and soybean meal futures, we find that DMMs improve the market quality of inactive contracts without disrupting the market quality of dominant contracts. Heterogeneity analysis in policy settings suggests that more DMMs are conducive to improving market quality for corn and soybean meal futures. We demonstrate that DMM policy is a feasible measure to facilitate continuous activeness in Chinese agricultural futures markets. Our results are important for exchanges and regulators seeking to better design and implement designated market-making programs in agricultural futures markets.

The heavy reliance on herbicides for weed control has led to an increase in resistant weeds in the United States. Robotic weed control is emerging as an alternative technology for removing weeds mechanically using artificial intelligence. We develop an integrated weed ecological and economic dynamic (I-WEED) model to examine the biophysical and economic drivers of adopting robotic weed management and simulate the optimal timing and intensity of robotic adoption within and across growing seasons. We specify a cohort-based weed growth model that relates yield damages to effective weed density and treats the susceptibility of weeds to herbicides as a renewable resource that can be regenerated by using mechanical weeding robots, due to a fitness cost that makes resistant weeds less prolific. Compared to myopic weed management which ignores resistance development, forward-looking management leads to earlier adoption of robots and treating robots as complements instead of substitutes to herbicides. This weed management results in adopting fewer robots, deploying robots on a smaller portion of the land, higher profitability, and lower yield loss in the long run, relative to myopic management. Counterintuitively, myopic management leads to a lower resistance level through its higher robot adoption intensity. We also find that a lower level of initial weed seed resistance and/or a higher fitness cost result in a higher level of resistance because they create incentives for farmers to delay the adoption of robotic weed control. Our analysis shows the importance of jointly considering the interactions between weed ecology and economics in analyzing the incentives and effects of robotic weed management on weed resistance.

We estimate the implicit market price of soil erosion using quarterly data of 2824 agricultural farms traded in Uruguay between 2000 and 2014. A unique feature of our estimation is that we allow for possible spatial spillovers. We find evidence of a negative and statistically significant association between erosion and land values. On average, an additional loss of 1% of the original topsoil due to erosion is associated with a direct (own) decrease of .24% in the per-hectare price of agricultural land (P-value: .012, 95% CI: −.0042, −.0005). In 2023 dollars, this is equivalent to a decrease of USD 8.7 in the average price per hectare, or USD 1130 in the price of the average farm. In terms of tons of soil, the average value is $.24 a ton. Finally, considering the 50 km radius of our spatial model, the value of losing 1% of topsoil is $15.8 million. The value of our estimates is sensitive to our measure of erosion and our specification of the spatial-temporal weighting matrix, but the statistical association is robust.

Aspirations defined as future-oriented desires or ambitions, can determine agricultural investments and rural development. Aspirations are shaped by people's social, cultural, and physical environment and can be affected by external factors such as natural disasters. This article addresses the question of how weather shocks can influence individual and community aspirations. Using primary panel data from two survey rounds before and during a major drought in Zambia, we show that such extreme weather events can be associated with adverse impacts on individual aspirations. Further exploratory analyses suggest that aspirations towards assets that are particularly vulnerable to droughts are affected most. We do not find any significant effects of drought on community aspirations.

Despite technologies' critical roles in agricultural productivity, evidence is scarce on how conflict affects technology adoption and consequent agricultural productivity, often due to a lack of data in fragile states. Our study contributes to filling this knowledge gap by using unique large-scale data on rice producers before and after a military coup in Myanmar in 2021 that led to a significant increase in conflicts in the country. We find that the increase in violent events including those in adjacent townships significantly changed the rice production function in both factor-neutral and non-neutral ways. Specifically, increased violent events have been generally associated with downward factor-neutral shift in production function, and more importantly, increased output elasticity to agricultural capital (equipment) owned (in other words, reduced output resilience against capital ownership shocks). Our evidence also suggests that this has been led partly through reduced access to agricultural extension services, which would otherwise help farmers maintain productivity even with limited capital ownership by substituting it with human capital and skills. Our results consistently hold for both panel and cross-sectional production functions across various specifications and particularly in Lower Myanmar. Results also indicate that lower mechanization service fees partly mitigate these effects.

Drought events are a major cause of large crop yield losses with implications for food security and farmers’ incomes. Growing multiple crops simultaneously during a cropping season is a well-known on-farm risk management strategy to cope with these drought risks. However, the effectiveness of this crop diversification under different severity levels of drought and how this effectiveness is influenced by the crop composition is unclear. This article provides new methodological and empirical insights to assess the effectiveness of such diversification, in particular to cope with extreme drought. We apply and evaluate nested Archimedean copulas and elliptical copulas to assess simultaneous farm-level yield losses of different cash crops in German agriculture (winter wheat, winter barley, winter rapeseed, sugar beet, and grain maize) under different drought severity levels (N = 249,756; regionally pooled farm-level crop-yield pairs, 1995–2019). We show that on-farm crop diversification contributes to cope with drought risks, but its effectiveness varies considerably across regions, crop pairs, and drought severity. Our results underline that cropping system diversification alone is often not sufficient to cope with drought risks, but that the right crop combinations are needed. For example, during a severe drought (one in 20 years event), 26.4% of farmers in eastern Germany suffered simultaneous yield losses of at least 20% in winter wheat and winter barley, while 19.1% of farmers in eastern Germany suffered simultaneous yield losses of at least 20% in winter wheat and sugar beet. Farmers should therefore be encouraged to grow crops with more diverse phenological requirements throughout the year.

An overview of how macroeconomic shocks affect beef quality-grade premiums and discounts in the U.S. fed cattle market is discussed. We review the shock transmission linkages along the beef industry supply chain and determine the economic implications for the finished cattle market. The analysis provides insight into how the fed cattle market responds to macroeconomic shocks. The economic implications of financial risk associated with the behavior of beef carcass quality-grade premiums and discounts associated with the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic are contrasted and assessed.

Data analysis indicates that macroeconomic shocks affect the quality-grade premium pricing mechanism for finished cattle. The origins of the shock (aggregate demand versus aggregate supply) and government fiscal policy intervention determines how premium levels and premium volatility responds to a macroeconomic shock. Thus, beef carcass quality-grade premiums are not only subject to industry idiosyncratic risk, such as swings in the seasonal demand for beef, but are also subject to systematic risk associated with business cycle fluctuations.