It's Loud Up There...

 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...