Yesterday I had the privilege of moderating a panel discussion focused on gene editing hosted by the Farm Foundation. The main speakers included: Allen Van Deynze, Ph. D., Director, Seed Biotechnology Center and Associate Director, Plant Breeding Center, University of California, Davis Richard Lawrence, Ph.D., Head of Genome Editing, Yield, Disease, and Quality Research, Bayer Crop Science Fan-Li Chou, Ph. D., Senior Vice President, Scientific Affairs and Policy, American Seed Trade Association Alison Van Eenennaam, Ph.D., Professor of Cooperative Extension in Animal Biotechnology and ..read more

That’s the title of a new paper co-authored with Joe Cooper, Vincent Breneman, Meilin Ma, Josh Maples, and Shawn Arita that was just published in Food Policy. Here’s the abstract: “This paper quantifies the impact of the COVID-19 disruption on U.S. meatpacking production. We employ a confidential plant-level meatpacking plant data set from USDA that gives daily livestock (cattle, swine, broilers) slaughter by individual firms and their individual plants. We found a larger underutilization rate of processing capacity for larger-sized beef and pork plants during the peak of plant slowdowns in Ap ..read more

That’s the title of a new article by David Just released by the European Review of Agricultural Economics, and the subject of David’s keynote at the European Association of Agricultural Economics Meeting this week in France. He writes: “Throughout the early 2000s, many departments of agricultural economics reduced their faculty size and some prominent departments began to generalise their focus to cover applied economics broadly and/or diminish their emphasis on agriculture in particular. This was in response to what had been seen as a long and inevitable drift to the irrelevance of agricultur ..read more

That’s the title of a new study I conducted with Brandon McFadden and Trey Malone for the United Soybean Board through the Center for Food Demand and Sustainability. We surveyed 1,200 U.S. consumers earlier this year and asked about a variety of perceptions related to soy-based products with eye towards how consumers view soy protein and soy oil relative to the alternatives. There’s a lot in the survey, but I’ll highlight a couple results. The first is from a conceptual mapping (or pile sorting) exercise. We asked the following question. Respondents were shown a list of 13 sources of protein ..read more

The July 2023 edition of the Consumer Food Insights survey is now out. I want to draw attention to one set of questions we added that delved into consumers’ beliefs about beef vs. plant-based, cell-cultured, and lab grown alternatives. Each respondent was only asked one set of these questions. Cell-cultured and lab-grown refer to the same thing, but we were curious if the the alternative labeling produced a different set of beliefs. By and large, respondents have positive perceptions of beef. Animal welfare is the only characteristic which consumers rated more positively than beef. The specif ..read more

With the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability (CFDAS) at Purdue, we’ve been working on a project funded by the United Soybean Board and the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research to explore the impacts of various investment alternatives on soy farmer profitability. To undertake the economic modeling, we need to understand consumer demand for a variety of soy-based foods, and the extent to which consumers are willing to substitute between soy-based foods and other products. We’ve now released three short research reports on consumer demand for: dairy, almond, oat, and soy ..read more

I’m excited to announce that I will serve as the next Vice President and Dean of the Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University, beginning early August. It has been an honor and privilege to serve as the head of the Agricultural Economics Department at Purdue University, and I will miss my friends and colleagues in West Lafayette. Now it’s time for a new challenge. There are many exciting things happening at Oklahoma State University, including the near completion of the New Frontiers campaign and building, a new University strategic plan that has clea ..read more

The May 2023 edition of our monthly Consumer Food Insights survey is now out. A few highlights: Consumer food spending is at its highest level since our survey because in January 2020. Food insecurity ticked up to 16%. There has been a decline in the length of time individuals report being on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) (conditional on being in the program) Some good news: we continue to see a steady decline in the share of consumers who report not being able to find items they wish to buy at the grocery store. That is, reported stock-out rates are declining. We ..read more

The latest edition of our monthly Consumer Food Insights survey is now out. They report conveys the results of the survey conducted in the latter part of April 2023. Here are some of the main findings. 55% of consumers shopped at a dollar store in the past 30 days Most commonly (30%+) bought snack foods, candy, beverages About 25% did not purchase food Consumers tend to live closer to a dollar store than they do to the place they do most of their grocery shopping About half of consumers said they’d be more likely to shop at a dollar store if it had a more full service grocery section ..read more

We continue to add new dashboards on our Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability (CFDAS) web page. We have added two new dashboards added in the past week. One on spending at dollar stores (includes Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar) and another on general retailers (includes Walmart, Target, and K-Mart). Here is an example of the general retail dashboard with Walmart selected. We now have almost 20 data dashboards that are regularly updating with new data about our food system ..read more