Trends in US organic agriculture
David LeBauer and Jessica Guo collaborated with Isaac Mpanga (Cooperative Extension) and Russell Tronstad (Agriculture & Resource Economics) on an analysis of trends in US organic agriculture systems. State- and national- level data were provided by the USDA Organic Production Surveys and the Census of Agriculture. Despite growth in organic farm numbers, area, and markets, adoption of organic production practices failed to keep pace, likely reflecting the challenges of increased regulation and production costs. This work was recently published as an open-access article in Current Research in Environmental Sustainability. All code and data are available on GitHub and Zenodo.
The CCT data science team collated additional years of USDA survey data and coded up a multivariate, hierarchical Bayesian model of year-over-year trends in farm area, number, and sales. This allowed us to explore state level trends as well as estimate missing values that the USDA had redacted. We also enjoyed exploring additional visualization methods, such as the R package ‘geofacet’, which retains spatial intuition without sacrificing visibility of smaller states (see figure above). The bump plot was also a fun and interesting visualization - here we can see that although the number of farms adopting specific practices associated with sustainable farming is on the rise, the proportion of farms using these practices is declining!
If you have a research project that could benefit from additional visualization, analysis, or custom software development, check out our Data Science Incubator RFP!