Accounting for climatic effects in measuring U.S. field crop farm productivity

Abstract

AbstractThe European Commission plans to reduce pesticides and fertilizer use in agriculture substantially under its Green Deal's Farm to Fork strategy. Policy alternatives are needed to overcome these input reductions, for instance by allocating R&D towards commodities most affected by climage change and improving the precision of input use. Since climate change is likely to impact agriculture negatively, productivity measures that account for all inputs and climate change impacts can help to weigh such policy responses. We adopt U.S. farm‐level data and a multi‐output and multi‐input production technology to estimate relative farm productivity performances with climatic effects. Exploiting long‐term weather patterns, we find comparative advantages among some crop farms and ample productivity improvement potential across all of them.