While U.S. farmers spent several years in the doldrums, agriculture in the rest of the world “appears to be in a sustained period of prosperity dating to the early 2000s,” said agricultural economist Carl Zulauf of Ohio State University. Growers overseas have steadily expanded the amount of land harvested for grains and oilseed since 2003, posing questions for U.S. farm income and for climate change programs.
“Is it reasonable or even possible to pull land out of agriculture or reduce its intensity of cultivation when economic incentives are to expand land in cultivation?” Zulauf wrote at the farmdoc daily blog. “Failure to take market incentives into account in designing climate change policy runs the risk of spending large amounts of money that may end up accomplishing little or even being wasted.”
While farmers overseas expanded their harvested area of grains and oilseeds by an average 17.8 million acres annually since 2003, U.S. area has been relatively unchanged, said Zulauf. He also pointed to an analysis that farmers in Argentina, Brazil, Russia and Ukraine were more likely to make money from corn and soybeans over 2013-17 than were U.S. growers. The billion-dollar question for U.S. agriculture is whether the surge in commodity prices that began last summer is a long-lasting phenomenon, he said.