A typical household spends only a few dollars per week on eggs, but seemingly everyone has been talking about egg prices this winter. That is what happens when a product most people buy quintuples in price. 

The humble potato is a staple of diets throughout the world. It originated in Peru before spreading through the world in the 1500s. Some historians credit it with ending famine in Northern Europe and even with fueling European imperialism. It is easy to grow, stores well, and is versatile and tasty.

The new wave of agricultural technology will enable machines to take over tasks that people used to do. Robots that weed fields and harvest crops will replace people who could have been done the task. This fact causes people to worry a lot about job loss.

When horses lost their jobs to tractors, the horse population dropped by 85%. What will happen when robots take over agricultural jobs?

Growing up on a sheep farm in New Zealand, two tasks that sometimes fell to me were digging out thistles and spraying barley grass. It was important to keep these weeds from spreading, and teenagers were the lowest-cost weed eliminator. 

This article was written by UC Davis ARE PhD students Ze Zhang and Mengfei Zhou.  It is the sixth of six excellent articles written by students in my ARE 231 class this fall.

I published 44 Ag Data News articles in 2022 (including this one). Five of them were written by students in my ARE 231 class.

Here are the 7 most read articles. For the top 5, I define most read by total views on my website and my substack site. I added numbers 6 and 7, which had lower view counts than some that did not make the list, but they had high engagement on Twitter.

Here's the list.

Frenchman Karim Benzema was awarded the Ballon d’Or as the world best soccer player in 2022. The award capped a roller coaster career in which he first played for France as a 19 year old. He was left out of the team that won the 2018 World Cup before returning in 2021 and immediately forming a potent scoring partnership with Kylian Mbappé.

This article was written by UC Davis ARE PhD students Yao Ma and Zhiran Qin.  It is the fifth of six excellent articles written by students in my ARE 231 class this fall.

This article was written by UC Davis ARE PhD student Raghav Raghunathan.  It is the fourth of six excellent articles written by students in my ARE 231 class this fall.