A SPATIALLY EXPLICIT, LONG-TERM EXAMINATION OF THE CHANGING CLIMATE-PRODUCTIVITY NEXUS OF US AGRICULTURE

Our overarching goals in this project are to 1) improve and extend (backward and forward in time) sub-national agricultural input, output and productivity metrics to create a data series that span upwards of a century of US agriculture; 2) quantify and investigate the productivity implications stemming from long-term shifts in the footprint of US agricultural production at multiple spatial scales (that is county, state, and national levels); 3) utilize these new measures alongside spatially congruent climate- and pest-risk metrics to deepen our understanding of the long-term climate-productivity nexus; and 4) develop and deploy new methods to enhance data accessibility and sustain future updates of the core productivity series.To achieve these broad goals, we set the following objectives:Objective 1: Revise (where possible and appropriate) and update the current University ofMinnesota International Science and Technology Practice and Policy (InSTePP) Center's inputand output series for US agriculture at the national and state levels.Objective 2: Develop a set of partial- and multi-factor productivity measures for USagriculture at the national and state levels using a range of alternative indexing procedures.Objective 3: Develop crop-specific partial-factor productivity measures for key US field cropsat the national-, state-, and county-levels, in addition to a spatially standardized gridded seriesof estimates at the sub-county level using a newly developed hierarchical gridding systemdeveloped by the University of Minnesota's GEMS Informatics Center.Objective 4: Drawing on this range of newly compiled productivity metrics, in conjunctionwith compatible gridded climate and pest-risk data developed by the GEMS InformaticsCenter, quantitatively investigate the evolving climate- pest-risk cum productivity nexus in USagriculture, paying particular attention to the productivity implications of geographical movements in thelocation of crop and agriculture production over the long term.Objective 5: Develop coded, back-end data processing workstreams coupled with anApplication Programming Interface (API) front-end to enable more sustainable, timely, andmore frequently updated access in future years to these primary productivity indicators (seeObjective 2) by way of the GEMS Exchange service hosted by the GEMS Informatics Center.