Member Blog: David Zilberman

My annual review 2018

Towards the end of every year I post a summary of my personal and professional activities. They are intertwined. I hope this summary is enlightening to people who are interested in the university, its people and their ideas. I discuss first personal aspects, and then move to research and academic activities.

I am 71 and my main question is “to retire or not to retire.” My wife, Leorah, is a retired teacher who is spending her time creating wonderful yarn art, reading and writing, enjoying music, family and friends. For me, retirement may mean more family time, however I will continue doing research and select university activities and may do more consulting. Not retiring means, continuing to teach undergraduates, which I actually enjoy, especially since I started a new course on economics of supply chains. It also implies more intensive involvement in university life. I feel that I have more creative research in me, and I would like to put my two programs — the MDP and the Beahrs ELP — on more sustainable footing before retirement. So, I guess I will continue to contribute to the pension fund, rather than draw from it.

In the next few years our department is being exiled from Giannini Hall to University Hall. We hopefully will return in two years. Giannini has been my second home for 45 years and I discovered a lot of treasures and discarded a lot of junk during the transition. I believe and hope that the transition will make us stronger and we will enjoy being closer to downtown Berkeley.

At my age grandchildren are major sources of pleasure. Ours are scattered throughout the country, two in New York, two in Arkansas and two in Seattle. This year we enjoyed birthdays in New York and Seattle, and all of us met for a wonderful Thanksgiving in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which has great coffee shops, a wonderful yarn store, and is an enjoyable university town.

My main research emphases are economics of supply chain, technology and the bioeconomy. The starting point of my supply chain work is that we live in a world with a high rate of technological change and supply chains are created to implement innovations. My research aims to understand the design of supply chains, what type of contracts emerge, and how new markets are created as part of these supply chains. Working with Tom Reardon and Liang Lu, we tried to understand how this supply chain spread across nations, and to explain the evolution of companies like Amazon, Ali Baba, Wal-Mart and Apple. Three years ago, we started a workshop on innovation and supply chain at Berkeley, and this year we had a wonderful experience, where we learned (and tasted) how chocolate, wine and other foods are produced, distributed and sold. My research on technology aims to understand the implications of the introduction of electronic and autonomous vehicles, and the supply chain of fuel and other logistics associated with these technologies.

In my bioeconomy work we found that many of the concerns about the negative impacts of biofuel on food prices and land use were overblown. Corn ethanol made modest contributions to improve US balance of trade and rural economy, while it made minimal contributions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Sugar cane ethanol on the other hand can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. My work on agricultural biotechnology continued to document some of the benefits to developing countries. For example, Bt Eggplant in Bangladesh Increases Yields and Farmers’ Incomes, and Reduces Pesticide Use. My aim in this research is to contribute to the development of sound regulation of biotechnology and biofuel that will address problems of climate change, food security and improve economic wellbeing.

This year I became the president of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). We have about 2,500 members, and about two-thirds participated in our annual meeting in Washington, D.C. In my presidential address, “Agricultural economics as a poster child of applied economics: big data and big issues,” I emphasize that agricultural economics is part of economics but it has its own unique features. It is inspired by the challenges of real-world problems and it has been data oriented for a long time, before it became so cool. It has a multidisciplinary emphasis and has contributed many concepts to economics, including human capital, adoption and diffusion. Working with the AAEA board and staff has been enjoyable. The main challenge we have this year is to respond to the proposed relocation, reorganization and potential cuts in the Economic Research Service of the USDA. We’re making an effort to keep and enhance the contribution of agricultural applied economists to governmental decision making, and I really appreciate the support we received from our members, and other groups.  I’m looking forward to our next year’s annual meeting in Atlanta.

I wish everyone as individuals and our country and the world a good 2019.

2019 NAREA Meeting: Post-Conference Workshop on Environmental Regulation and Innovation in Local Communities

Workshop Announcement and Call for Papers:

The 2019 Northeast Agricultural and Resource Economics Association (NAREA) Post-Conference Workshop will be held June 11-12, 2019, in Portsmouth, NH

Deadline is February 18, 2019

Due to the need to remain globally competitive while espousing more sustainable production and consumption patterns, local communities are under increasing pressure to adopt innovative strategies to manage the economic and environmental impacts of environmental regulations. Further, increasingly decentralized regulatory design and enforcement can create wide disparities in economic and environmental outcomes across jurisdictions, reinforcing any anxiety and competition between states and local governments with respect to economic growth and environmental quality. Local communities can adopt productivity-enhancing and pollution reducing technologies while also developing innovative policy approaches and governance structures to manage these impacts. It is therefore imperative to understand how local communities innovate – both in the technological and policy/governance spheres, the factors that motivate them to do so, and how their innovations determine the environmental and economic outcomes they experience. Additionally, and equally vital is an understanding of how individual households and businesses in local communities help shape local environmental regulations and the channels through which they can influence the design of local regulations.

This workshop seeks to invite a conversation among researchers, think-tanks, government agencies and policymakers to enhance our understanding of how local communities innovate when shaping and responding to environmental regulations, and how these environmental regulations affect rural communities’ economic well-being and environmental quality. Keynote speakers include:

• Kathleen Segerson, University of Connecticut
• David Popp, Syracuse University

We are interested in soliciting empirical and/or theoretical papers using state-of-the-art methods to examine the impact of regulation on various metrics of innovation, environmental quality, and economic performance to assess the well-being of local communities - rural or urban - in the context of environmental regulation. We would like to invite papers that deal with a variety of innovative approaches to respond to regulation such as (but not limited to) abatement technology adoption and diffusion, environmental patenting, energy and transportation infrastructure, as well as innovative policy and governance approaches including information disclosure mechanisms, environmental management systems, social responsibility-oriented practices, government-NGO partnerships and other multi-stakeholder cooperative initiatives. We hope to see papers thinking about how regulation and innovation impact various environmental quality measures such as (but not limited to) industrial air, water, hazardous waste and other types pollution as well as issues related to land use, forest stewardship and management, and energy use. Further, papers that can related regulation and innovation to economic performance, in terms of output and productivity, production efficiency, employment, investment, property prices, capital expenditures, infrastructure spending and global competitiveness, among many others. Finally, we are interested in attracting papers that examine how to enhance public participation of citizens in local communities and those that investigate the channels through which individual households and businesses can influence public policy.

Abstract Submission Guidelines
Authors wishing to have a paper considered must submit an extended abstract by Monday, February 18, 2019, 5 pm eastern. Abstracts must be submitted online at http://www.narea.org/2019-workshop, where authors will be prompted to provide:

• name, address, e-mail address and phone number of paper presenter or primary contact;
• title of paper
• name and institutional affiliation of paper presenter and co-author(s)
• 2-4 key words
• extended abstract: 1000 to 1500 words maximum
• references cited

Electronic acknowledgements of submissions will be sent to all submitters. Abstracts will be reviewed by the NAREA Workshop Selected Papers Committee in terms of the significance to the field, strength of methodology/design, and clarity of writing. Authors will be notified of the status of their abstract by April 1, 2019.

Selected paper presentations will be 20 minutes. Full papers must be received from notified authors by May 16, 2019, to be included in the workshop's program. Papers presented at the workshop will be considered for expedited review and publication in a special 2020 issue of the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review (ARER) if final versions of the papers are submitted to ARER by July 31, 2019.

Thanks to anticipated funding sources that support this workshop’s emphasis on innovation and local communities, we will be able to provide a combination of travel support and honoraria on a limited basis. In addition, all paper processing fees will be covered for papers accepted into the journal. Further information concerning workshop registration and the final program will be provided in the spring issue of the NAREA Newsletter and on the NAREA website.

For more information, please contact the NAREA Workshop Organizing Committee:

• Donna Ramirez-Harrington (Donna.Ramirez-Harrington@uvm.edu), University of Vermont
• Martin D. Heintzelman (mheintze@clarkson.edu), Clarkson University
• Shadi Attalah (shadi.atallah@unh.edu), University of New Hampshire
• Stephan J. Goetz (sgoetz@psu.edu, Penn State and NERCRD

NAREA Statement on Diversity and Inclusion: NAREA is committed to promoting a culture of inclusivity at our conferences, workshops and in our journal.

Members in the News: Hart, Kolodinsky, Kimle, Bozic, Michelson, Maertens, Ellison, Jacobs, Barkley, Schulz, Zhang, Plastina, and Novakovic

Chad Hart, Iowa State University U.S. farmers store record soybean crop as China dispute slashes exports By: Chicago Tribune - November 27, 2018 "Individually, we've got some problems out there," said Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. "This squeeze will be enough to put a few farmers out of business." (Continued...) Read more on: Chicago Tribune Jane Kolodinsky, University of Vermont Practice what we preach By: Rutland Herald - December 6, 2018 Authors Jane Kolodinsky, Sean Morris and Orest Pazuniak note that using a representative sample of adults who experienced Vermont’s mandatory GE labeling policy, nearly one-third of respondents reported seeing a label. (Continued...) Read more on: Rutland Herald Kevin Kimle, Iowa State University Beyond The Farm: A Look At The Wide World Of Ag Degrees By: KUNC - December 5, 2018 Just down the hall from Gaul is Kevin Kimle, a former ag entrepreneur and current director of the college’s Agricultural Entrepreneurship Initiative. Kimle said the ag-entrepreneur market is “hot,” but acknowledges that a lot of people don’t think about ag in as “innovative” or “entrepreneurial.” (Continued...) Read more on: KUNC Speakers: hyper-local weather, tech, will help farmers By: Capital Journal - November 21, 2018 Farmers are likely to use the technologies to take advantage of specialty markets offer opportunities for high-tech, said speaker Kevin Kimle, an economist at Iowa State University at Ames, Iowa, and director of the ISU’s Agricultural Entrepreneurship Initiative. (Continued...) Read more on: Capital Journal Marin Bozic, University of Minnesota Farm bill details released: What it means for Minnesota, from farming to food stamps By: MPR News - December 11, 2018 But the safety net will be significantly stronger for the dairy industry. Marin Bozic, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, said it will be much cheaper for small dairy farmers to buy what is essentially insurance against low prices. (Continued...) Read more on: MPR News Hope Michelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Annemie Maertens, University of Sussex Brenna Ellison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Misperceived quality: Fertiliser in Tanzania Written by Hope Michelson, Annemie Maertens, Brenna Ellison, Anna Fairbairn, and Victor Manyong: VoxDev - September 12, 2018 In most of sub-Saharan Africa, limited fertiliser use on small farms is a dominant factor contributing to poor crop yields, low incomes, and food insecurity (Sheahan and Barrett 2017, Sanchez 2002). Numerous factors contribute to persistently low fertiliser usage including high fertiliser prices and variable crop prices, farmer risk-aversion, and limited access to credit and insurance (Feder et al. 1985, Foster and Rosenzweig 2010, Duflo et al. 2011, Karlan et al. 2013). However, amidst this debate as to the key factors, the perceived quality of the fertiliser itself is often missed. (Continued...) Read more on: VoxDev Keri Jacobs, Iowa State University Ag Co-ops Are More Than Seeds And Sales, They’re Boosting Rural Economies By: Harvest Public Media - November 1, 2018 “Cooperatives were created to provide a marketing outlet for producers in an era when they generally didn't have a lot of options in marketing their grain,” said Keri Jacobs, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. (Continued...) Read more on: Harvest Public Media and Illinois Public Media Andrew Barkley, Kansas State University Research fortifies the holiday meal By: KTIC Radio - December 10, 2018 For many families, it’s a pretty special time when the holiday ham is sliced, veggies are cooked and the rolls are golden brown. Kansas State University agricultural economist Andrew Barkley notes that consumers may not realize there’s probably a healthy helping of science on the holiday plate, as well. (Continued...) Read more on: KTIC Radio Chad Hart, Iowa State University Lee Schulz, Iowa State University 10 Predictions for Farmers in 2019 By: Successful Farming - November 21, 2018 About 3 million acres of crop production in the U.S. will shift to corn in 2019, with a 15-billion-bushel corn crop and record-setting corn production worldwide. “This big-crop phenomena is set for years, and it's not just here in the U.S.,” says Chad Hart, crop marketing specialist at Iowa State University. Livestock production has been growing in the U.S. for five years and won’t stop this year. “We expect continued expansion,” says livestock economist Lee Schulz, Iowa State University. He predicts record production of beef in 2019. Beef exports are the primary reason why prices are as strong as they are, he says. We export almost 12% of our beef and about 23% of our pork on a carcass weight basis. (Continued...) Read more on: Successful Farming Wendong Zhang, Iowa State University Annual Survey Finds Farmland Values Down Slightly By: Iowa Public Radio - December 12, 2018 Wendong Zhang, an economics professor at ISU, collects information from realtors, lenders, appraisers and other people who monitor farm sales and transitions. He says the 0.8 percent decrease in farmland value compared to last year is partly still a correction from the record-high values of 2013. This is the fourth time in the past five years that land values have decreased. (Continued...) Read more on: Iowa Public Radio, Radio Iowa, Des Moines Register, and Corn and Soybean Digest Lee Schulz, Iowa State University Meat production heads for more records in 2019 By: Iowa Farmer Today - November 28, 2018 Lee Schulz, Extension livestock marketing economist with Iowa State University, says 2018 production climbed above 100 billion pounds nationally for the first time in history. Meat production is up 12 percent overall since 2014, he says. (Continued...) Read more on: Iowa Farmer Today Alejandro Plastina, Iowa State University Choosing corn hybrids for 2019 By: Wallace Farmer - November 26, 2018 Choosing corn hybrids is a decision that’s tormented farmers for generations. According to the Iowa State University publication, “Estimated Costs of Crop Production in Iowa — 2018” prepared by ISU ag economist Alejandro Plastina, approximately 16% of the total cost of production in a corn-soybean rotation system is corn hybrid seed cost. This number illustrates the significant risk involved in farmers’ hybrid seed decision to their overall operation. (Continued...) Read more on: Wallace Farmer Andrew Novakovic, Cornell University Farm Bill leaves conference, passes Senate, headed for House By: Watertown Daily News - December 12, 2018 “The reason why the Farm Bill got passed, and got passed mostly along the lines of the Senate, was the Republicans calculated they would like the bill more before January 1 than after January 1,” when the Democratic House will come to power, said Andrew Novakovic, E.V. Baker professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University. (Continued...) Read more on: Watertown Daily News

See other Member in the News items Know another AAEA Member who has made statewide, national, or international news? Send a link of the article to Sinais Alvarado at salvarado@aaea.org What research and topics are you working on? Want to be an expert source for journalists working on a story? Contact Allison Scheetz at ascheetz@aaea.org.

*Articles in response to the AAEA Communicating Out Strategy Press Releases highlighting: Government Relations, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Applied Economic Perspectives & Policy, Choices Magazine, General Media, and/or 2018 AAEA Annual Meeting in Washington D.C.

Webinar: America’s Diverse Family Farms: 2018 Edition

Farming is still an industry of family businesses. Ninety-nine percent of farms are family farms, and they account for 87 percent of farm production. Small farms make up 89 percent of the farm count and operate 52 percent of the Nation's farmland. The largest share of farm production, however, occurs on large-scale family farms.

In this webinar, ERS Economist Christopher Burns will present findings from America’s Diverse Family Farms, 2018 Edition, a brochure that describes in detail the different types of farms in the United States.

Mon, Dec 17, 2018
01:00 PM EST
Christopher Burns, PhD
https://go.usa.gov/xPSv4