Daniel Alan Sumner

University of California, Davis | UCD · Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics

Increases in global meat demands cannot be sustainably met with current methods of livestock farming, which has a substantial impact on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water consumption and farm animal welfare. Cultivated meat is a rapidly advancing technology that produces meat products by proliferating and differentiating animal stem cells in...

Farm workers are exposed to high risk of heat-related illness, especially when their jobs require working outside at a fast pace during hot days. Climate change has increased the number of days with high temperatures, and thereby the amount of time that farm workers are likely exposed to extreme heat. To better understand how high heat exposure aff...

Catastrophic coverage, fully-subsidized insurance that provides indemnities when yields fall below 50% of historical averages, has been the most widely used crop insurance product among specialty crop growers in the United States. Patterns in catastrophic coverage across a variety of fruit, vegetable, tree nut and horticultural crops and indicate t...

Milk cow feed rations in California include a huge variety of by-product feeds that contribute a substantial share of nutrition. By-product use helps moderate feed costs, provides important income to by-product suppliers, frees Central Valley crop farm resources (land and water) for other uses, and reduces environmental consequences of waste.

Sample costs to establish a vineyard and produce wine grapes are presented in this study. It is intended as a guide only, and can be used to make production decisions, estimate potential returns, prepare budgets and evaluate production loans. Practices described are based on production practices considered typical for the crop and area, but these s...

Most U.S. states that have regulated and taxed cannabis have imposed some form of mandatory safety testing requirements. In California, the country’s largest and oldest legal cannabis market, mandatory testing was first enforced by state regulators in July 2018, and additional mandatory tests were introduced at the end of 2018. All cannabis must be...

en We explain the interplay of law and economics in the successful WTO challenge by Canada of U.S. mandatory country‐of‐origin labeling (COOL) measures for beef and pork, which hinged on origin of livestock used in U.S. meat production. Canada mounted a successful legal and economic strategy to convince WTO adjudicating bodies that the United State...

Traditional sources of retail price information, such as scanner data and government price surveys, are not available for cannabis. To help fill this gap, between October 2016 and July 2018 the UC Agricultural Issues Center collected online retail price ranges for dried cannabis flower and cannabis-oil cartridges at retailers around California. Dur...

Every batch of cannabis sold legally in California must be tested for more than 100 contaminants. These contaminants include 66 pesticides, for 21 of which the state's tolerance is zero. For many other substances, tolerance levels are much lower than those allowed for food products in California. This article reviews the state's testing regulations...

We report new estimates of beekeeper costs and revenues, which include major activities undertaken by beekeepers, including honey producers and pollinators. We use our cost estimates, recent govern- ment surveys and other United States Department of Agriculture information to characterize supply functions for (1) pollination services to crops that...

Cannabis sold legally within California is governed by regulations that require that any batches released for retail sales first pass a set of laboratory tests. These testing regulations are part of a large package that regulates cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, and retailing. It is important to understand the costs of supplying cannabis t...

Water woes are growing globally as farmers and others struggle to develop infrastructure and institutions that allow the agricultural economy to thrive in the face of competing uses for water. While not new, these struggles are deeply important, and nowhere more so than to agriculture within arid regions. This chapter uses the California water cont...

This article explains incentives that individuals face when deciding whether to support legislation on farm-animal treatment. We analyze precinct-and town-level voting patterns in two successful referendum votes (California's Prop 2 and Massachusetts's Question 3) that restricted animal-housing practices. In both cases, support for the referendum w...

Manure-sourced methane emissions from livestock operations in California will soon be subject to new regulation, as required by Senate Bill 1383, which was signed into law in 2016. Regulations, beginning in 2024, will require reductions in methane emissions from livestock manure, with a 40% reduction target by 2030. The California dairy industry ac...

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) substantially expands the authority of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate fresh produce marketed in the United States. This article uses an equilibrium-displacement framework incorporating stochastic food-borne illness outbreaks to simulate long-run market effects of FSMA using the North Ameri...

Honey bees have garnered much attention in recent years. Concerns about long-term sustainability of pollinator populations have been coupled with concerns about implications for food supplies. We use a novel formulation of a multiple input, multiple output, two season equilibrium simulation model to explore economic linkages across the markets of b...

This study focuses on how subsidized crop insurance affects crop choices. Crop insurance may change farm investments by reducing risks and providing subsidies. First, actuarially fair insurance reduces risks in crop production and marketing, holding the expected return constant. Second, insurance subsidies encourage farms to purchase crop insurance...

Cambridge Core - Natural Resource and Environmental Economics - Wine Globalization - edited by Kym Anderson

Crop insurance premium subsidies affect patterns of crop acreage for two reasons. First, holding insurance coverage constant, premium subsidies directly increase expected profit, which encourages more acreage of insured crops (direct profit effect). Second, premium subsidies encourage farms to increase crop insurance coverage. With more insurance c...

This review focuses on the economics of policies in US states (or localities) that have regulated farm practices and related behavior. Some of these policies represent long-standing policies to govern the nature of farm organization, such as regulation of corporate ownership, investment, or organization. Other more recent policies attempt to affect...

While a substantial literature on the effect of professional expertise in markets exists, consumers' "homegrown" knowledge has received little attention in economics. We combine data from a novel valuation experiment, in which participants received information about and bid on wines sequentially, with data on participants' wine knowledge to examine...

This article uses a novel experimental approach to measure consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for wine attributes. We invited customers of a local supermarket who had selected a bottle of wine to purchase to participate in a valuation experiment. Integrating their original wine choice into the experiment, each participant evaluated six alternative w...

The impacts of climate change on agriculture depend on local conditions and crops grown. For instance, warmer winter temperatures in a given area would reduce chill hours, potentially cutting yields for some crops but extending the growing season for others. Using a century of climate data and six decades of acreage data, we established quantitativ...

This article establishes quantitative relationships between the evolution of climate and cropland using daily climate data for a century and data on allocation of land across crops for six decades in a specific agro-climatic region of California. These relationships are applied to project how climate scenarios reported by the Intergovernmental Pane...

The dimensions that define a food product have expanded rapidly to include characteristics of the production process, marketing arrangements, and implications that production and consumption of the product have for the environment. Some market intermediaries have responded by requiring that their suppliers abide by restrictive production practices....

This article reports the first publicly available egg production costs compared across 3 hen-housing systems. We collected detailed data from 2 flock cycles from a commercial egg farm operating a conventional barn, an aviary, and an enriched colony system at the same location. The farm employed the same operational and accounting procedures for eac...

Country of origin labeling (COOL) occurs routinely for many products in many places, but the US implementation of mandatory COOL for meat, whose purpose is to identify the origin of the livestock used to produce the meat, generated much controversy and a major WTO dispute that has yet to be settled. This paper estimates econometrically differential...

Climate models predict more weather extremes in the coming decades. Weather shocks can directly reduce crop production, but their effect on food markets is partly buffered by storage and supply responses that can be complex and nuanced. We explore how inter-hemispheric trade and supply responses can moderate the effects of weather shocks on global...

High corn prices cause farmers to plant more corn on fields that were planted to corn in the previous year, rather than alternating between corn and soybeans. Cultivating corn after corn requires greater nitrogen fertilizer and some of this nitrogen flows into waterways and causes environmental damage. We estimate the effect of crop prices on nitro...

We use field-level data to estimate the response of corn and soybean acreage to price shocks. Our sample contains more than 8 million observations derived from satellite imagery and includes every cultivated field in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. We estimate that aggregate crop acreage responds more to price shocks in the short run than in the long...

While U.S. consumption of olive oil has tripled over the past two decades, nearly all olive oil continues to be imported. Estimation of a demand system using monthly import data reveals that the income elasticity for virgin oils sourced from EU is above one, but demand for nonvirgin oils is income-inelastic. The demand for olive oil as a single pro...

We develop a dynamic model to assess the effects of policy expectations on crop supply and illustrate the approach with estimates of the effects of base updating in U.S. crop programs. For corn and soybeans in the Corn Belt, the effect of base updating is relatively small because relevant crop alternatives are subject to similar policies and the al...

According to the official US government definition, about two million farms operate in the United States, a total that has changed little for more than three decades. However, the US government defines a "farm" as an operation that produced or normally would produce at least $1,000 in gross value of output per year (O'Donoghue, Hoppe, Banker, and K...

Place names or geographic indicators used to identify wines (or other products) have long been raised as major marketing and policy issues, but these have become even more important and more complex with increased globalisation. The issues arise especially for food and beverage products where characteristics of particular regions are most likely to...

This study contributes to the empirical industrial organization literature by deriving and estimating the empirical equation containing the parameter for bargaining power and an indicator of competition between suppliers. We specify a reduced form of the price equation, which is composed of the minimum price specified in milk marketing orders and t...

This article examines the diffusion of technological innovation within the California wine industry by studying the adoption of ozone-cleaning technology. The paper compares ozone with other sanitizing systems and reviews current perspectives on innovation diffusion and adoption before describing and analyzing the results of a 2007 industry survey...

a b s t r a c t Climate has obvious direct effects on agricultural production. The reverse is more apparent than ever as greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are tallied. The development and effective diffusion of new agricultural practices and technologies will largely shape how and how well farmers mitigate and adapt to climate change. This...

We model the economic behavior of beekeepers who shift bees from crop to crop to follow successive blooms. On each crop, foraging bees jointly produce honey and pollination services. Accordingly, the supply of pollination services to growers of a given crop depends on both the price of honey and the demand for pollination services from other crops....

The US dairy markets have experienced a pronounced cycle in recent years. The Dairy Price Support Program has authorized government purchases and storage of commodity cheese, butter, and nonfat dry milk since 1949. The program supports the prices of these dairy products at government purchase prices and, thus, indirectly supports the market price f...

Agriculture in the Central Valley of California, one of the USA’s main sources of fruits, nuts, and vegetables, is highly vulnerable to climate change impacts in the next 50 years. This interdisciplinary case study in Yolo County shows the urgency f or building adaptation strategies to climate change. Although climate change and the effects of gree...

Policy "reform" in agricultural markets is often associated with less government regulation and expenditures, or a shift towards more efficient interventions. The European Union (EU) adopted major policy changes for processed fruits and vegetables in 2001 and again in 2008, and we employ a simulation model to examine the effects of the three policy...

The United States and South Korea negotiated a bilateral trade agreement in 2007. After final legislative approval, likely later this year, high tariffs on exports of most California agricultural products to South Korea will be gradually eliminated. Already, with the tariffs in place, South Korea ranks among the top six destinations for many Califo...

The US egg industry is being pressured from many directions to change its production practices, particularly to address concerns about hen welfare in conventional cage systems. Responding to similar pressures, in 1999, the European Union banned conventional laying cages starting in 2012. This now impending European ban has led to the development of...

Conventional cage housing for laying hens evolved as a cost-effective egg production system. Complying with mandated hen housing alternatives would raise marginal production costs and require sizable capital investment. California data indicate that shifts from conventional cages to barn housing would likely cause farm-level cost increases of about...

Sometimes, authorities are unable to rapidly identify the origin of a tainted product. In such cases, recalls or warnings often apply to all suppliers, even to those that had not contributed to the contamination. Traceability enables more targeted recalls by identifying the product's origin more specifically. In this article, we show how increased...

The US trade policy for ethanol affects imports and all aspects of ethanol production and use. The paper reviews U.S. trade policy for ethanol and then examines the pattern of imports of ethanol. Despite high tariff barriers the U.S. is a major ethanol importer and we document the pattern of ethanol imports over the past decades. We then show how e...

Beginning January 1, 2015, conventional cage housing for egg-laying hens is scheduled to be prohibited in California. We consider the economic implications of the new hen housing regulations on the California shell egg industry. Our data show that egg production is more costly using noncage systems than conventional cages. The main result of the ne...

Agricultural economists helped develop farm programs to respond to the dire economic situation of the 1920s and 1930s. Some early authors appreciated that such policies created problems in markets for commodities and inputs. Over time, our understanding of agricultural issues and policies has deepened. Through the application of improved models and...

Daniel A. Sumner focuses on commodity prices in an historical context and asks what can be learnt from observing how the recent situation fits in the long price history. Although there are distinct causal agents for each commodity, markets are linked across commodities, and prices tend to move together, especially over the long run. While the patte...

This study presents an empirical analysis of the import demand for Brazilian ethanol by its six major foreign buyers. The primary objectives of this study were to identify the economic factors affecting the demand for ethanol imports and to derive long-run price and income elasticities of import demand. These elasticities could be used to analyze t...

The objective of this case is to introduce students to what is possibly the most complex agricultural cooperative in the United States and learn more about the economic issues involved in citrus production globally. Students are asked to analyze a strategy built around brand loyalty with higher costs and an inability to dictate to growers what vari...

We investigate revealed political market power reflected in the pattern of price discrimination by end use that is the hallmark of U.S. milk marketing orders. We show that the pattern of prices that would maximize producer profits, if producers operated a cartel with monopoly power in a regional market, is far above actual government-set price diff...

Some have suggested that the US food stamp program (FSP) should be revised with a view to combating obesity among the poor. In this paper, we assess the likely impacts of allowing FSP participants to purchase only healthy foods when using food stamps. Our results indicate that FSP participants would probably increase their consumption of healthy fo...

The emergence of grape wine as a mainstream alcoholic beverage in China is relatively new. However, rapidly increasing wine consumption in China provides a significant trade potential for the United States and other wine exporting countries. This paper investigates the Chinese wine market using retailer data with a focus on imported wines. Supermar...

California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) adopted by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) on April 23, 2009 requires a 10% reduction in the average greenhouse gas (GHG) emission intensity of the state’s transportation fuels by 2020. This regulation is expected to reduce lifecycle GHG emissions per year by 20–25 million metric tons by...

When authorities are unable to identify the origin of the tainted product, food recalls are often applied to all suppliers, including to products not linked to the contamination. One role of traceability is to identify more specifically the origin of a product, enabling more targeted recalls. In this paper, we show how increased traceability contri...

Low and variable farm income has been a main rationale for heavy government intervention in agricultural markets and income transfers to farmers whether in Europe in response to disruptive agricultural imports and low world prices at the end of the 19th century or in the US in response to the Great Depression. While the future of the Common Agricul...

Barry Kriebel, President of Sun-Maid Growers, wants to explain to his growers how price discovery has occurred in the raisin industry. The case asks the reader to explain the key determinants of demand and supply for raisins, analyze price discovery, and consider alternative investments.

Introduction Agricultural Productivity Growth and Policy Reform Ex Ante Evaluation of Productivity Versus Policy Innovation An Index of National Food Security Commodity Trade Policy and Food Security Concluding Comments References

Many commentators have claimed that farm subsidies have contributed significantly to the "obesity epidemic" by making fattening foods relatively cheap and abundant. But U.S. farm policies have generally small and mixed effects on farm commodity prices, which in turn have even smaller and still mixed effects on the relative prices of more- and less-...

In horticultural markets, trade barriers often apply to the processed products whereas domestic support applies to farm-produced raw commodities. Here we assess the effects of such trade barriers and domestic support by simulating the effects of policy reform on global processing tomato markets, which are faced with modest processed product tariffs...

Recent food scares such as the discoveries of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and E. coli-contaminated spinach have heightened interest in food traceability. Here, we show how exogenous increases in food traceability create incentives for farms and marketing firms to supply safer food by increasing liability costs. We model a stylized marketing ch...

This chapter contains section titled:

Exotic Pests as Public “Bads” and Pest Exclusion and Eradication as Public “Goods” Institutions and Policies for Exotic Pests Evaluation of Exotic Pest Programs Conclusion

Introduction Biology and Ecology Introduction and Spread Intervention Strategies and Technologies Potentially Affected Parties Policy Scenarios Methodology To Estimate the Yellow Starthistle Control and Rangeland Restoration Policies Results General Discussion and Implications

Introduction Industry Context Economic Analysis Public Policy for Eradication

exotic pests;public policy;biosecurity;invasive species;foot-and-mouth disease

Recent trade negotiations have attracted much attention to the consequences of domestic support applied to agricultural markets. In various markets, researchers have examined the economic effects of regimes and scenarios with less, or different forms of, domestic support including decoupled payments. Here we examine the domestic support regimes for...

The share of raw milk meeting fluid quality (Grade A) standards in the United States rose steadily through the latter half of the twentieth century, but a shrinking portion of that was used in fluid products. Grade A milk exceeds the quality standards for the manufactured products for which it has been increasingly used. We present an econometric m...

This paper analyzes potential changes to the U.S. food stamp program (FSP) that have been suggested by some nutritionists and others with a view to combating obesity among the poor. Specifically, we use models of consumer behavior, firm supply, and market equilibrium to assess the impacts of allowing FSP participants only to purchase healthy foods...

This article begins with a review of what has happened to U.S. domestic farm policies and related agricultural trade policies over the past 10 years. We conclude this review with a brief overview of the policies as they stand today. Then we consider potential outcomes in the 2007 Farm Bill, and their implications for U.S. agriculture and, in partic...