Paul W. Rhode

Adapting North American wheat production to climatic challenges, 1839–2009

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that temperatures in the major grain-growing areas of North America will rise by 3–4 °C by 2100. Such abrupt changes will create major challenges, significantly altering the area suitable for wheat. The historical record offers insight into the capability of agriculture to adapt to climatic challenges. Using a new county-level dataset on wheat production and climate norms, we show that during the 19th and 20th centuries North American grain farmers pushed wheat production into environments once considered too arid, too variable, and too harsh to cultivate. As summary measures, the median annual precipitation norm of the 2007 distribution of North American wheat production was one-half that of the 1839 distribution, and the median annual temperature norm was 3.7 °C lower. This shift, which occurred mostly before 1929, required new biological technologies. The Green Revolution associated with the pioneering work of Norman Borlaug represented an important advance in this longer process of biological innovation. However, well before the Green Revolution, generations of North American farmers overcame significant climatic challenges.

Horn of Plenty . The Globalization of Mediterranean Horticulture and the Economic Development of Southern Europe, 1880-1930

During the late nineteenth century, competition from cheap American grains undermined agricultural economies across Europe. This article investigates how similar forces of globalization in the production of Mediterranean fruits and nuts dampened economic prospects across southern Europe and in some cases contributed to outright economic and political crises.

The Impact of the Boll Weevil, 1892–1932

The boll weevil is Americas most celebrated agricultural pest. We analyze new county-level panel data to provide sharp estimates of the time path of the insects effects on the southern economy. We find that in anticipation of the contact, farmers increased production, attempting to squeeze out one last large crop. Upon arrival, the weevil had a large negative and lasting impact on cotton production, acreage, and especially yields. In response, rather than taking land out of agricultural production, farmers shifted to other crops. We also find striking effects on land values and population movements.

The “Tuberculous Cattle Trust”: Disease Contagion in an Era of Regulatory Uncertainty

By 1900 scientific breakthroughs revealed that bovine tuberculosis was a serious and growing threat to animal and human health. Early private and state initiatives in the U.S. to address the problem were often counterproductive because they increased the incentives for the interstate trade of diseased stock. Our investigation shows that just one unscrupulous dealer exposed thousands of dairy herds and families to the disease. The story bears on the broader economics literature because it helps explain the expanding federal role in regulating food safety. In this case regulations arose from genuine health concerns. Moreover, before the development strict regulatory policies, diagnostic innovations that could have helped prevent the spread of the disease actually made the operation of markets worse by increasing asymmetric information problems.

Harvests and Financial Crises in Gold-Standard America

Most American financial crises of the postbellum gold-standard era were caused by fluctuations in the cotton harvest due to exogenous factors such as weather. The transmission channel ran through export revenues and financial markets under the pre-1914 monetary regime. A poor cotton harvest depressed export revenues and reduced international demand for American assets, which depressed American stock prices, drained deposits from money-center banks and precipitated a business-cycle downturn - conditions that bred financial crises. The crises caused by cotton harvests could have been prevented by an American central bank, even under gold-standard constraints.

Not on My Farm! Resistance to Bovine Tuberculosis Eradication in the United States

The active opposition to technical change has frequently impeded economic growth. This article examines the widespread resistance to government-led campaigns to use new tuberculin testing technologies to eradicate bovine tuberculosis in the United States. We explore three issues: the political economy of opposition; the role of earlier scientific controversies in the discourse; and the techniques used by the opponents. Over time, the protests shifted from challenging the scientific merits of the testing technology to more nuts-and-bolts distributional and administrative issues.

Did Plant Patents Create the American Rose

The Plant Patent Act of 1930 was the first step towards creating property rights for biological innovation: it introduced patent rights for asexually-propagated plants. This paper uses data on plant patents and registrations of new varieties to examine whether the Act encouraged innovation. Nearly half of all plant patents between 1931 and 1970 were for roses. Large commercial nurseries, which began to build mass hybridization programs in the 1940s, accounted for most of these patents, suggesting that the new intellectual property rights may have helped to encourage the development of a commercial rose breeding industry. Data on registrations of newly-created roses, however, yield no evidence of an increase in innovation: less than 20 percent of new roses were patented, European breeders continued to create most new roses, and there was no increase in the number of new varieties per year after 1931.

Biological Globalization: The Other Grain Invasion

Contemporary accounts of the history of globalization place the grain trade in a leading role. Narrowing price gaps for wheat in world markets serve as the key indicator of increasing market integration. And the chief example of an early policy backlash is the rising protectionism of European importers in response to the “Great Grain Invasion” of New World grain in the late nineteenth century. These accounts focus on the important role of falling transportation cost, but neglect other crucial biological innovations that allowed expanding the wheat cultivation in the new lands, what we call the “other grain invasion.” This paper documents that over the 1866-1930 the average distance of world wheat production from the core consumer markets doubled, as the wheat frontier moved on much harsher (colder and more arid) climates. Examining the detailed histories of major producers on the periphery, we show that this move involved, and indeed required extensive experimentation by farmers and crop scientists to find new suitable cultivars that could thrive in the new environments and survive the evolving pest and disease threats. Flows of germplasm and knowledge about breeding occurred not only from center to periphery, but also and importantly within the periphery and from the periphery to the center as an increasing integrated global community of crop scientists emerged over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, we speculate about why in some regions pioneering plant breeders are heralded as national heroes whereas in others they are sadly under-appreciated.

Hog-round marketing, seed quality, and government policy: Institutional change in U.S. cotton production, 1920-1960

Between 1928 and 1960 U.S. cotton production experienced a revolution with average yields roughly tripling while the quality of the crop increased significantly. This article analyzes the key institutional and scientific developments that facilitated the revolution in biological technologies, pointing to the importance of two government programs—the one-variety community movement and the Smith-Doxey Act—as catalysts for change. The story displays two phenomena germane to the recent literature: an important real-world example of Akerlofs lemons model and a case in which inventors, during an early phase of the product cycle, encouraged consumers to copy and disseminate their intellectual property.We would like to thank Shelby Baker, Dick Bassett, Fred Bourland, J. Jerome Boyd, David L. Carlton, Peter Coclanis, Harry B. Collins, John Constantine, Tom Culp, Early C. Ewing Jr., Deborah K. Fitzgerald, Janet Hudson, Susana Iranzo, Hal Lewis, Gary Libecap, Shelagh Mackay, C. W. Manning, Leslie Maulhardt, William Meredith, Robert Margo, Massimo Morelli, Larry Nelson, Carl Pray, Gene Seigler, Macon Steele, Nancy Virts, Henry Webb, Gavin Wright, and two anonymous referees for their comments and assistance. Julian Alston played an especially important role in shaping our analysis. We also benefited from the comments of the seminar participants at the Triangle Economic History Workshop, the University of Mississippi, Harvard University, the Spring 2002 All-UC Group in Economic History Conference at Scripps College, and the 2003 Meetings of the American Historical Association. Work on this article was facilitated by a fellowship granted by the International Centre for Economic Research (ICER) in Turin, Italy.

Patent Citations - An Analysis of Quality Differences and Citing Practices in Hybrid Corn

Patents are the main source of data on innovation, but there are persistent concerns that patents may be a noisy and biased measure. An important challenge arises from unobservable variation in the size of the inventive step that is covered by a patent. The count of later patents that cite a patent as relevant prior art – so called forward citations – have become the standard measure to control for such variation. Citations may, however, also be a noisy and biased measure for the size of the inventive step. To address this issue, this paper examines field trial data for patented improvements in hybrid corn. Field trials report objective measures for improvements in hybrid corn, which we use to quantify the size of the inventive step. These data show a robust correlation between citations and improvements in yields, as the bottom line measure for improvements in hybrid corn. This correlation is robust to alternative measures for improvements in hybrid corn, and a broad range of other tests.We also investigate the process, by which patents generate citations. This analysis reveals that hybrids that serve as an input for genetically-related follow-on inventions are more likely to receive self-citations (by the same firm), which suggests that self-citations are a good predictor for follow-on invention.