It's Loud Up There...

 In my last installment, I opined that farmer's markets are a unique outlet in the food supply chain, in part because we see so many elementary economic lessons at play. With the new tariffs on imported foods coming on the scene (except for when they're not, but usually are on again, but sometimes off again, though there are exceptions, except when there aren't, etc.) grocery prices have started to rise.  A student in my supply chain management class gave a presentation last week about his uncle's BBQ restaurant and said they've quit offering certain types of fish on their menu: their suppliers stopped carrying it so as not to have to suffer the tariff, while the alternative for the uncle was to pay >2x the price at Sam's Club or Costco for the same fish.  If consumers (and restauranteurs alike) are about to face higher food prices no matter where they shop, does this mean that people now have an additional incentive to just go to farmer's markets? Potent...

 There's something special about farmer's markets. My family and I love farmer's markets. In grad school at Purdue, we hit up all available, and rarely missed any. Saturday mornings across the river in Lafayette; Wednesday evenings just down the street in West Lafayette; and outside the school year, Thursday mornings on Purdue's campus (side note: why don't more college campuses host farmer's markets?)  Before we had any kids, in 2016 my wife and I went to Boston for the AAEA annual meeting (ag economics conference). In Copley Square beside Trinity Church was the largest farmer's market I've ever been to in my life, even to present day. Blueberries brought down from Maine, locally baked goods, just about anything you could think of was available in massive quantity. (source: https://www.newenglandopenmarkets.com/boston-open-market)  We're rather partial to our small, local market in Downtown Murray. It's a fraction of a fraction of the size of th...

I'm generally not a fan of the Fall season. Everything that was once green is now turning brown; what was once blooming and full of life now looks...well, not that. Also, it's getting colder, but at least the bugs are on a shortened timer --- especially mosquitos. Make no mistake: I love that apples are in season, and it's pretty hard to beat a drink of in-season cider. Not to mention, we typically associate Fall with crop harvest, which means (hopefully lots of) grain being stored ready to market (hopefully profitably). But there's one thing that is unique not just to North America, but this part of the US for many thousands of years, and that is the largest tree-borne fruit native to the continent. I'm talking about the pawpaw. Other names include "The Poor Man's Banana", "The Indiana/Hoosier Banana", and "The Mississippi Banana". Quite the pattern in the alternative names, no? Anywhere from mid-September to early-October, the paw...

Once again, I'm going to discuss a recent publication of mine (potentially the last one for a while). This time is different. Rather than try to give a high-level overview that abstracts away from all the math and statistics and coding - though some would argue that is the interesting part - I'm going to put the research almost into story form. It all started with  my paper with Tanner McCarty about hemp pollen  drifting from one farm to another and messing things up. We had no data but had to act quickly, so I took part in a paper that was precisely what I thought I swore off of: economic theory. After the KY Department of Agriculture provided us with some key farm-level data on hemp production, we wrote and published  another paper in the AJAE . In the midst of that publishing process, it was brought to our attention by a fellow ag economist that this sort of problem was going on in the soybean sector. Needless to say, Tanner and I were eager to branch out of an area as...

This news is a few weeks old, but I managed to bag another fun  (at least to me)  publication. It started as a footnote in my MS thesis in the Fall 2014 semester at Purdue University, with my eventual PhD advisor, Jim Binkley. Finding this paper a home took us a while, but now it can rest easy. Its title: " The Chow Test with Time Series-Cross Section Data ". It was the first journal article I ever helped write, let alone submit to a journal. While there's hopefully more to come, it's my most recent. If you have a regression model using nested data over groups and subgroups (e.g. industries & firms, counties & states) you may want to test for the presence of group effects. Often this is done with a Chow Test to examine differences in slopes for the groups' regression lines. However, if each datapoint has multiple observations (e.g. each county in the states in your sample has 5 years' worth of data), then this method may inadvertently detect subgroup d...

I recently received some very good news that a journal article my friend and I coauthored and put under review was finally accepted for publication in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics . The article is titled, "Adapting network theory for spatial network externalities in agriculture: A case study on hemp cross-pollination". Rolls right off the tongue, no? The idea came to me one night when a group of Murray State ag faculty, local farmers, and hemp processors met for a dinner with the USDA Office of the General Counsel at the Big Apple Grill & Bar in town (highly recommend, if you're ever in Murray, KY). One farmer during the conversation spoke up and said he grew hemp for CBD production in a specific field that year, but was going to switch to growing hemp for fiber or grain in that field the next year. Turns out, a neighboring field was growing hemp for fiber, it shed its pollen, the pollen landed on the flowers of the first farmer's hemp (detrimen...

For a while now, I've been meaning to begin writing a new blog post, but couldn't seem to find the exactly right starting point (if there is such a thing). Some advice from one of my PhD committee members came to mind, "At this stage, don't think --- write !". So, once again, I find myself putting that wise mentor's advice into action. We just harvested our first pineapple since 2018! Way back then, I was writing my dissertation from our little apartment on the eastern end of Indianapolis while I worked my first big kid job (full time, salary, benefits, meetings where people say stuff like "aligned", the works). Our daughter was just a few months old and learning to crawl around --- faster each day, much to our first-time parental concern. This is, as I recall, a dwarf South African pineapple. As you can see in the picture, it is quite small. But it is absolutely bursting with flavor, which you would expect given that it is stem-ripened rather than p...

I said previously that I would create a blog to highlight my research, tell stories, share pictures, and give my thoughts on matters about which I know anything more than nothing at all. Oh, yes, and this was all at the beginning of the Spring 2020 semester. Let's just say all that energy and ambition had to be "redirected" for a few years. Now here we are, quite some time later, at long last. Check out my bio, take a gander at my teaching and research, and follow me on social media if you have the inclination (I'm not super active on there, but I get around to it when I get around to it). Most of what I'll be posting on here is research ideas, teaching experience, farming stories, wisdom that a mentor shared with me that I want to pass along, and other related material. Moving forward, I need to sift through massage some of the potential topics to post about on here. But rest assured, there will plenty of material coming in the future months. After all, *points t...