The need as indicated by stakeholders

This project serves a wide range of agricultural sector stakeholders, including producers, trade associations, natural resource managers, environmental groups, consumer groups input suppliers, processors and policymakers engaged in the design and implementation of public policy related to agricultural research and development (R&D) and the adoption and utilization of new agricultural technologies, as well as others who are affected by new agricultural technologies. This ranges from farmers, ranchers, and others engaged in the total supply chains of U.S. agriculture spanning from input suppliers through to American consumers and those who advocate for environmental quality and conservation. Ultimately, every American is a stakeholder in this project. This project directly aligns with the USDA’s priorities for research and development in 2026 by generating evidence to help increase the profitability and productivity of U.S. farmers and ranchers through more efficient agricultural research investment, innovation, and technology adoption. By analyzing public and private R&D, technology transfer, digitization, AI, precision agriculture, smart irrigation, and biotechnology, the project will support USDA’s goals of reducing inputs, increasing profitability, expanding market opportunities, and translating research into practical benefits for both producers and consumers.

Agricultural R&D and innovation are essential features of the economy. They are central to maintaining access to food at reasonable costs in the face of increasing demand, by increasing yields, preserving the environment and thus the productivity and sustainability of our limited land and water resources. R&D and innovation also increase product quality and the value-added of agriculture. Innovation reduces the risks and increases the resilience of agriculture in the face of plant and animal diseases, wildfires, weather events, pandemics, and trade disruptions plus increase the environmental friendliness of agriculture.

This project serves its stakeholders by conducting studies of agricultural innovation systems and by developing models and measures of the economic consequences of past and prospective changes in the technologies used on farms, and the role of public and private R&D policy in facilitating those changes. These studies enable the stakeholders in U.S. agriculture to better understand how agricultural R&D contributes to the development and diffusion of new technologies that will help American farmers adapt to changes in their decision-making environments plus maintain the sustainability of agriculture into the future. Understanding and adapting to new technologies is a cross-cutting issue because of the difference of factors that farmers and other stakeholders in U.S. agriculture face plus the need to manage our scarce land and water resources in a sustainable fashion.

Various initiatives at the state, regional, and national level have emphasized the importance of research, extension, and technology transfer in helping farmers adapt to various changes they are facing. In this context, stakeholder groups have called for social science research to address various issues related to the economics of agricultural R&D and innovation. These issues can be divided into four broad, yet closely interrelated, areas related to agricultural R&D, innovation, and technology, each with a number of pressing questions:

1. Understanding how R&D, innovation, and new technologies facilitate adaptive responses to change in markets, policies, and the physical environment:

○   How does agricultural R&D and innovation respond to the challenges arising from environment, pest, disease, food safety, weather, population, demand growth, biosecurity, natural disasters, or pandemics?

○    When and how do private incentives arise for innovation to meet these public and productivity impacting challenges?

○   How does agricultural R&D and innovation respond to the emergence of new technological opportunities, evolving market conditions, production shifts, and public perceptions of different farming technologies and production systems? What is the role of the government in regulating those technologies and production systems?

○    How does U.S. agricultural R&D respond to increasing competition from China, India, and Brazil and the increasing size and sophistication of their agricultural R&D and production capacities?

○    How does agricultural R&D respond to the introduction of new products that substitute for traditional product categories (such as margarine and vegetable shortening in the early 20^th century, or dairy and meat substitutes today)?

2. Understanding the research and development (R&D) institutions and processesthat contribute to innovations in food and agriculture:

○  Who is doing R&D and innovation for agriculture and why? Who is financing R&D? How is the structure of R&D changing, and why?  What are the regional and national returns to R&D? What are the roles of intellectual property and regulations in incentivizing, constraining, and otherwise shaping both public and privately funded R&D?

○  How does technology transfer and the presence of incentives affect the performance of the innovation supply chain, connecting research labs with development, commercialization, marketing, extension, and the demand side of farmers and beyond?

3. Understanding the technology adoption and diffusion processes that bring innovations into commercial practice:

○   What determines the adoption for different technologies? What are potential patterns of spatial and social diffusion?

○   How are consumer preferences, public perceptions, and private food industry standards and practices influencing technology adoption upstream by producers?

○   To what extent is technological diffusion affected by the growing prevalence of contractual relationships in agriculture such as vertical integration?

○   How does adoption of technologies in foreign markets affect U.S. technology providers as well as U.S. farmers and US commodity market and consumer prices?

4. Evaluating the impacts of research and innovation along multiple dimensions:

○  How do we characterize and measure productivity changes? How do we account for non-market or public goods & bads in productivity measures?

○  How are new information technologies and data systems likely to change agricultural value chains?  How do the value and ownership structure of emerging data affect the integration of agricultural value chains?

○  How much does research contribute to rural development and increase the wellbeing of rural America?

○  Who are the winners and losers when an innovation is introduced? How might the incidence of losses generate opposition, economically or politically?

○  How do we understand, measure, and value the impact of new technologies on sustainability and resilience of resources on which agriculture depends?

In many cases the locus of production and the comparative advantage of different regions is evolving.  Where is this happening and how can R&D contribute to maintain regions of current productivity?

These four broad areas of stakeholder demands are intimately interconnected. The variety of questions across all four areas share many important themes involving production, cost, markets, regional advantage, the environment, health, and security. Crucially, many stakeholders understand the importance of taking a long-term, integrative, dynamic view of these interrelationships.

The first broad area, on adaptive response, emphasizes those interconnections. A unifying factor is the recognition that agricultural research and innovation play a central role in addressing emerging issues by developing and delivering new technologies that better adapt the current system of agriculture to cope with change while meeting food, sustainability and other stakeholder needs. Much applied agricultural R&D is maintenance or adaptive research, for which it is crucial to understand the need for a (crop or livestock) species to be perpetually improving, adapting and evolving, because competing organisms (such as pests and pathogens) do not cease evolving. This effect is accentuated and accelerated by environmental changes, including land use, weather conditions, incidence of extremes, and water availability. Thus, some R&D is needed for the industry just to stay in place in the face of todays challenges. Similarly, R&D initiatives arise in response to temporary or permanent loss of access to input supplies or to important markets—whether due to trade, travel, or resource depletion disruptions. The development of new technologies that increase flexibility in logistics and trading relationships, re-deploy disrupted commercial links, or substitute inputs, enable the rapid response of value chain structure to mitigate or accommodate the effects of such disruptions on stakeholders. 

NC1034 research pays particular attention to the needs, conditions, or factors that induce innovation, and in turn how the resulting innovations cause or enable agriculture to adapt to meet those stakeholder needs. Such feedback or interdependencies are understood to be facilitated by markets, private investments and public policies. Yet, it is not necessarily a rapid process. It is recognized by stakeholders that there can be long time lags of many years from when research needs are recognized and research funding begins, to when new technologies become viable and are made available to farmers. The process of adoption itself can take considerable time and adopted technologies may continue to be used, having impacts on productivity and the environment, for decades. For this reason, changes in R&D are understood to have very long-cycle effects on productivity and economic wellbeing.

Some stakeholders might not realize they cannot take the future availability of a stream of new technologies as a given. Thus, the second broad set of issues is to understand how socio-economic factors affect the R&D institutions and processes that largely account for the supply of innovations and how evolving factors in society change public support for creating and making those technologies available to producers. It is also key to understand timing characteristics of the innovation creations and diffusion process to understand how reductions in R&D investment influence the future stream of productivity improvements.  NC1034 research serves this stakeholder interest by examining how public and private-sector research systems identify demands for, engage in technology development and ultimately increase productivity, reduce cost and improve environmental friendliness of agricultural systems.

The contributions of agricultural research depend not only on the amount of funding, but also on the sources and mechanisms of funding, the commodity focus and the organization of the research process. Dramatic changes have been made to the organization and funding of agricultural research that pose challenges and present opportunities. Over the last three decades, the total amount of public funding for agricultural R&D has been shrinking in real terms. The share of state agricultural experiment station (SAES) research funded by state governments has declined, relative to the shares funded by the USDA, other federal agencies and the private sector. This situation has led to the recent development of research partnerships between universities, federal labs, and private industries, particularly in the areas of biotechnology and biofuels R&D. The structure and performance of such collaborations plus their allocation of effort across components of the agricultural sector merit serious research investigation to inform public policy debates about public-private research partnerships.

In addition to domestic R&D systems in the United States, NC1034 is also concerned with the organization and efficacy of international research and technology transfer in agriculture. This setting includes the role of traditional public sector sources of research funding and technology transfer such as the World Bank and the CGIAR, as well as private foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The NC1034 project also increasingly considers the role of private sector R&D around the world, and how competing private interests may shape incentives to innovate or may directly invest new resources in R&D for agriculture. It also widely considers the ways domestic and international investments benefit domestic interests as well as world conditions.

The third broad issue that stakeholders need to consider is how economic incentives and public policies facilitate or hinder technology adoption, the diffusion of technologies across the economy and the ultimate value of technology developments to producers, consumers and other industry stakeholders. The returns to farmers and ranchers who adopt a new agricultural innovation can be exceedingly different across a range of farm characteristics, and understanding how environmental, cost, market demand, price, and social characteristics influence uptake is key to interpreting and predicting the diffusion of new innovations and their ultimate impact. Another critical issue influencing adoption is market acceptance of new technologies, such as seen with the emergence of biotechnologies. Increasingly, farmers are expected and required to take into account societal attitudes toward their production practices, food industry production guidelines and product standards, and effects of voluntary and mandatory labeling requirements. The NC1034 project examines the direct effects of public perceptions and food industry standards toward farm and food technologies on agricultural producers and consumers, as well as the incentives and disincentives such factors create for technology development and dissemination.

The fourth broad issue important to stakeholders is impact. Foremost, this depends upon reliable measurement of the contribution of agricultural innovations to agricultural productivity. Growth of agricultural productivity is necessary to continue to feed the world’s growing population and at the same time conserve increasingly scarce natural resources and adapt to ever more challenging production environments plus benefit regions in a manner that does not greatly shift regional economic wellbeing. Productivity is a measure of the amount of agricultural production obtained from a given amount of land, water, and other inputs in a region or the nation. It thus directly relates to the amount of resources required to achieve a given amount of production. Productivity growth is thus a fundamental requirement to meet demands for food, fiber, and biofuels without placing undue pressure on land, water, and environmental resources. Key policy questions are: (a) Is productivity growth slowing down and contributing to rising global food prices; (b) what environmental factors are altering rates of productivity growth; (c) is productivity growth on pace to provide for future global food security? And d) are there high returning commodity or regionally aimed investments that might be pursued? This set of questions relates directly to both the economic and environmental impacts of agricultural production. Increasingly producer groups are being asked to document their resource “footprints” to meet consumer and processor demands for more economic and sustainable production practices.

Finally, stakeholders need information that requires the availability of data sources that describe regional production, cost, and investments as to allow these complex processes. Data on research, adoption, cost and productivity changes were more readily available when the public sector played a larger role. Increasingly agricultural R&D is carried out by the private sector, and data on private R&D activity and outcomes is often proprietary. Thus, considerable research, data collection, and partnership development is needed to measure the intensity of private sector innovation and its impacts. This requires finding, creating, and collecting data and tracking changes in R&D spending, patenting, licensing, complementary input requirements, product testing and costs to producers. Tracking public and private innovation activity (combined with an empirical understanding of the links between them) is critical to assessing whether future productivity will be sufficient to meet future demands while helping keep food production high and costs low along with adapting to increasing sustainability challenges, whether in the form of new pests, new weather patterns, natural disasters, extremes, or new market demands.

The importance of the work, and what the consequences are if it is not done.

Virtually all of the analyses of agricultural R&D conducted worldwide are based on methods developed by current or past participants of the NC1034 community (or its predecessor committees). NC1034 participants have conducted pioneering work in

• agricultural productivity measurement;


• estimation of the returns to agricultural research;


• assessment of the incidence of the payoff to agricultural research (the insight being that how and when an innovator captures a benefit from what they created can matter just as much if not more than the size of the benefit they capture);


• the determinants and effects of adoption of new agricultural technologies, particularly of biotechnologies and precision agricultural technologies;


• the implications of changes in intellectual property rights for U.S. agriculture;


• improved design of biotechnology regulations;


• design of processes for research evaluation, priority-setting, and management;


• design and evaluation of research funding mechanisms and processes; and


• evaluation of the impacts of environmental factors on agricultural productivity.

Through such work, members of NC1034 have developed multidisciplinary knowledge about the performance of the research system that has been communicated to policymakers, scientists, farmers, and the public through multiple channels. Publications of group members have been widely cited in policy documents and reports, and NC1034 members regularly serve as committee members for policy advisory groups—such as National Academy of Sciences panels. We regularly respond to requests from federal and state agencies, provide testimony to Congress, and serve as expert witnesses in precedent-setting court cases. Our work is regularly cited in regulatory decisions governing approval and deployment of new agricultural technologies. If the group’s work were not done, some consequences would include:

1. A lack of an objective, data-driven knowledge base to inform public policy debates and private decisions concerning new agricultural technologies;


2. A lack of understanding and appreciation of the contributions to society from agricultural research that benefit both consumers and producers;


3. A lack of understanding of barriers to the development and adoption of innovations that drive productivity growth and their consequences;


4. A lack of understanding the role of agricultural research in maintaining global food security, low food prices, food security and U.S. agricultural competitiveness while helping preserve natural resources, landscapes, and environmental quality at home and abroad;


5. A lack of understanding of the full nature of threats to agriculture posed by pest, natural disaster, weather extremes and other evolving factors, along with a lack of knowledge on R&D and technology diffusion strategies to limit those threats.

The technical feasibility of the research.

NC1034 members have developed robust methods for evaluating agricultural innovation systems and technologies. The group’s record of accomplishment of significant publications speaks to the feasibility of such methods. Methods developed by this group for agricultural research evaluation and priority setting have been adopted by practitioners worldwide and have received awards from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and other professional bodies.

The demands being placed on agricultural innovation systems have expanded over time and so have the NC1034 group’s methods. Members have drawn upon and shared a variety of novel methods, as problems require. These include applications of agricultural economics, industrial organization, intellectual property analysis, environmental valuation, quantitative modeling, rural sociology, human health and nutrition, machine learning, natural language processing models, and energy economics.

Given unprecedented recent disruptions in agriculture, altered weather extremes, shifting public private investment shares and the plethora of new actors engaged in the agricultural innovation system, NC1034 intends to seek ongoing feedback from various stakeholders on information needs and usefulness of our research findings. In turn we intend to improve the quality and relevance of our information on research impacts and investment returns. This will be initiated by inviting policymakers, industry leaders, venture capital investors, and others to participate in our research workshops and provide feedback plus dialogue on emerging needs. We will then seek out new opportunities to partner with appropriate stakeholders on specific studies and in the provision of key information.

The advantages of doing the work as a multistate effort.

NC1034 participants encompass agricultural economists, resource economists, and rural sociologists from a widely dispersed group of land-grant universities, public universities, research institutes, and governmental organizations. Additionally, the score of the research effort and realization of its productivity impacts plus research needs are geographically and commodity-wise dispersed across the nation and globe. In such an environment the work of NC1034 is made more effective as a multi-state effort because it allows knowledge sharing across fields, institutions, geographies and commodities, facilitating a comprehensive analysis of the innovation’s benefits across segments of the total supply chain along with spillovers from innovation. It also facilitates pooling of resources to increase collaboration and creates a network for mentoring the next generation of researchers studying agricultural innovation and productivity.

NC1034 provides a vehicle for participants to share and develop the latest social science and quantitative analytical methods in evaluating returns to the many dimensions of agricultural research and the producer, rural and consumer, socio-economic impacts of innovations. Most NC1034 members are also part of multi-disciplinary and multi-state research teams addressing important issues in agricultural technology development, adoption, and impact assessment. As part of those multi-state or multi-disciplinary teams, NC1034 participants take the lead in research problems associated with socio-economic causes and consequences of technological change. NC1034 as a multi-state effort allows participants to take these new evaluation methods back to their state and regional teams and apply them to local problems of interest. NC1034 allows members to benefit indirectly from knowledge gained directly by other members from multi-disciplinary projects. For example, one NC1034 member may gain valuable knowledge and develop valuable information from working on a project and then convey the insights gained to others. Knowledge and information is thus shared so that social scientists and agricultural scientists may work more effectively together, and a broad group of stakeholders will be informed on findings.

Agricultural research grants often require comprehensive, multi-dimensional evaluations of the regional, commodity-wise, socio-economic and environmental effects of new technologies and production practices. By continuing to develop cutting-edge evaluation methods, NC1034 members are better able to leverage grant funding and, most significantly, to make major contributions to regional and multi-state deliberations on research priorities in a multi-disciplinary setting. Furthermore, through publications and outreach, challenges, adaptation means and opportunities can be conveyed to private and public decision makers altering R&D choices and improving future productivity plus reducing vulnerability.

Multistate collaboration facilitates comparative analyses that can also be more comprehensive. Adoption of technologies and their impacts spill over across commodity, state and international boundaries. While there is a certain value of studying impacts of new technologies in their local and commodity specific context, there is also value in the ability to compare and contrast how new technologies affect agricultural producers in different areas or for different crop and livestock endeavors and in the identification of areas that may benefit from potential new technologies. Federal agencies, private industry, environmental groups and commodity groups are interested in evaluations of technology and environmental implications for technology that can be scaled-up to commodity-wide or national scale impacts. 

Members pool expertise across different production systems and environmental situations. For example, comprehensive evaluation of herbicide-resistant crop varieties requires knowledge of corn, soybean, and cotton production systems or impacts of breeding on milk production not only inform decision making in a local situation but also in different production regions. Pooling research expertise can help identify commonalities in new technology development and dissemination, as well as regional or crop/livestock-specific differences. Another advantage of multistate collaboration is that it can raise awareness of contributions in other fields of research and facilitate acquaintance with other potential research collaborators. It can also suggest research directions for related commodities or enterprises.

NC1034 has a long and successful history of working with the USDA Economic Research Service. University based participants in NC1034 have worked closely with ERS economists, and indeed ERS economists are active participants of NC1034. ERS has been instrumental in collecting and developing data to measure public and private agricultural R&D, productivity and costs. NC1034 has been an important forum to discuss research methods related to data development, productivity/cost estimation, and technology assessment. Through these forums, state-of-the-art methods for productivity measurement have undergone peer discussions and review.

NC1034 offers a unique and enduring community for mentoring the next generation of experts in economics of agricultural productivity and innovation as well as in quantitative analysis of productivity enhancement. Graduate students and junior faculty from across the United States benefit greatly from opportunities to present their research and receive constructive and detailed feedback from more experienced colleagues in a supportive and collegial environment and learn analytical approaches and have an opportunity to showcase emerging methods. Senior members of the community are enriched by engaging with younger colleagues who often bring fresh perspectives, deeper technical and newly emerging method expertise in rapidly evolving areas such as digital agriculture, AI, automation, biotechnology, and sustainability analytics. This dynamic exchange makes NC1034 more than just a research group—it serves as an intellectual home where scholars at all stages of their careers can develop ideas, learn new approaches, test methods, and refine/develop policy-relevant information. The community fosters collaboration that spans states, institutions, levels of experience, different training foci, and disciplines, enabling members to build long-term professional networks, to pursue joint projects and exploit relative advantage in a way that advances theory, practice, and R&D information quality and impact. Such collaboration is greatly strengthened by relationships among scientists across states and institutions. Through the newly founded AAEA section “Agricultural Innovation and Productivity," NC1034 will broaden its outreach to graduate students and early-career scholars, actively supporting their engagement in multi-institutional and multi-state research initiatives. By cultivating these connections, the section will not only expand professional opportunities for young scholars but also accelerate the generation of innovative research and policy/industry supporting information that enhance agricultural productivity and sustainability nationwide.

Finally, the multi-state community of scholars also provides opportunities for members to economize and achieve synergies through

• the ability to pool resources and share data;


• avoiding redundancy in research activities;


• increasing specialization and complementarity in research (e.g., one member may work on one aspect of a general problem, while another researcher works on another);


• transfer of both newly evolving and well established but complex analytical methods across research applications;


• cross-pollinate ideas on factors that influence the demand for and impact of technology, generating stakeholder decision making supporting information; and


• transfer of analysis results revealing challenges and opportunities to other applicable areas.

What the likely impacts will be from successfully completing the work.

Future contributions will build on previous ones by exploring emerging issues. These will include:

• continued formal and informal communication with stakeholders on these issues through multiple channels;


• policy engagement as evidenced by contributions to National Academy of Sciences panels, USDA and state funding allocation processes, and responses to requests from other federal and state agencies;


• continued contributions to the support of decision-making regarding the regulation of new technologies in agriculture;


• continued development of multidisciplinary knowledge about the performance of the research system and the returns to investment; and


• a continued stream of high-impact publications and other public communications to disseminate and advance that knowledge base.

Over the next five years, we envision future research to include studies that:

• continue the tradition of modeling and measuring the consequences of innovation with application not only to conventional agricultural technologies but also to deal with novel aspects of the new generations of genome editing, shifting agricultural locations, new market development and information technologies;


• develop new models and measures of the implications of the evolving funding structure and and management of public agricultural R&D;


• explore the role of innovation in the historical and ongoing structural changes in American agriculture and associated productivity growth;


• develop detailed institutional and quantitative understandings of the causes and consequences of the recent trends in regulation of existing and prospective agricultural technologies;


• explore the role of consumer perceptions and demand for genome-edited foods on R&D investment and regulations;


• investigate the mechanisms by which technologies are introduced to farmers, both through extension and private channels;


• investigate the implications of the growing prevalence of contractual structures in the supply chain for technological diffusion;


• explore the impact of venture capital and private equity investment on agricultural R&D, and the commodity and regional implications of the growing private role;


• explore the roles of startups and established firms in innovating new forms of agricultural enterprises, including “vertical farming,” meat substitutes, and cannabis production and marketing;


• evaluate private-sector agricultural input, producing technology, and processing research using new market-based measures and intellectual property information;


• explore and analyze models of stewardship and ownership of on-farm data in order to understand their implications for the growth and distribution of productivity gains from precision agriculture data collection;


• analyze the impact of adoption of conservation agriculture practices on soil health and resilience and explore the potential of market-based programs to incentivize adoption of conservation practices by agricultural producers;


• assess R&D needs to address opportunities and potential challenges brought by natural disasters, weather extremes, pests, shifts in regional locations of production, and increasing demand.