U.S. agricultural output more than doubled between 1948 and 2011, with growth averaging 1.49 percent per year. With little growth in total measured use of agricultural inputs, the extraordinary performance of the U.S. farm sector was driven mainly by increases in total factor productivity...

India's decelerating wheat- and rice-yield growth rates have led to questions of whether India's agricultural sector will be able to meet future food demands. To explore this issue, ERS researchers measure sector-level agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) growth and evaluate how public...

Precision agricultural (PA) technologies can decrease input costs by providing farmers with more detailed information and application control, but adoption has been sluggish, especially for variable-rate technologies (VRT). Is it possible that farmers have difficulty realizing these cost...

Attempts to seriously investigate the impacts of potential changes in climate due to increased greenhouse gases dates to the mid- to late 1980's. Some of the advances in impact analysis since the first studies: 1) Explicit modeling of adaptation within the farm sector. 2) Consideration of...