ARE 231 - Agricultural Demand and Supply

The class is split in two halves. I cover supply in the first five weeks and Tim Beatty covers demand in the second five weeks. This page contains material from my part of the class.

I emphasize empirical work, but I do cover some applied theory. We start big and end small; the first topic is global agricultural supply and the last is field-level supply.

Syllabus:  2020,  2019

Blog Assignment

I post weekly Ag Data News articles on my website that are loosely related to agricultural data. The articles are 600-1000 words with 3-4 figures. Your assignment is to write one of these articles.

Rules:       

  1. the topic must be something to do with agricultural supply
  2. you may work with a co-author
  3. you must provide code to generate any graphs that you create
  4. you may include graphs created by others (e.g., from papers, data portals such as FAOSTAT or my data apps.)

In Fall 2020, I published 8 student articles in Ag Data News. Follow this link and scroll to the bottom to read them.

Paper Assignments

These assignments require the students to do some empirical analysis to replicate and extend a paper, and to write up their work as though they aim to publish it in an academic journal. The papers must not be more than five single-spaced pages (including tables and figures). I do not want the paper to read like a diary, i.e. “first I did this, then I did that”. Rather, I want them to tell a story, including an outline of the question they are asking, a discussion of the empirical method, the results, and a conclusion. A reader should be able to duplicate the analysis. 

1. Global food commodity supply

2. Climate change and agriculture (panel approach)

3. Climate change and agriculture (Ricardian approach)

4. Field-level supply