Public interest in food systems has grown dramatically, and agricultural economists have important roles to play in contributing to and leading large-scale interdisciplinary studies of the subject. Key topics include understanding food system participants' behaviors and incentives and determining what food systems can and cannot achieve. I review a global food-security project funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture that illustrates the interactions between production, distribution, and consumption of food and regional self-reliance, as well as other important areas in which agricultural and regional economists can gainfully apply their tools and methods, including studies of the impacts of local food and network analyses.

This study analyzes the participation decision and income impacts of fair-trade coffee certification on small-scale coffee producers in the Araku valley in India using panel data for 183 households and endogenous-switching and quantile regression methods. The results show that fair trade certification has a positive effect on income; the income of certified farmers is 17 percent higher on average than the income of uncertified coffee producers. Furthermore, fair trade certification has a “bottom of the pyramid” effect in that the largest income gains accrue to farmers in the poorer quantiles.

This research employs an agricultural sector model that links seasonal crop production with disaggregated livestock production sectors, in tandem with observed quarterly data on U.S. drought conditions to assess the long term economic implications of drought for U.S beef cattle producers. Short term impacts show increases in feed costs as well as increases in cattle slaughter resulting from drought-induced culling. The price of live cattle decreases in the short run; however, feed prices remain above baseline levels, and beef cattle breeding inventories decline in the long run, leading to fewer calves moving through the supply chain.

This study identifies clusters of certified organic operations in the United States and determines the form of spatial autocorrelation present in the operations’ distribution. We identify large hot spots of organic operations along the West Coast and in the Midwest and Northeast with some variation based on how we define an organic operation. Further analyses suggest that organic operations do not necessarily follow the same geographic patterns as nonorganic agricultural and general business establishments. Spatial autoregressive models confirm the presence of significant spatial dependence in the distribution of certified organic operations for a number of different definitions of an organic operation.

We study consumers’ motivations for buying organic food by analyzing their shopping baskets. Buying organic can be motivated by concern about sustainable development and/or self-interest (considerations related to health or product quality). Pro-social motivation is inferred from the presence of fair trade products in the consumer's basket; consumer self-interest is deduced from the presence of healthy and higher-quality products bearing special quality labels or certifications. Our results indicate that environmental motivation predicts organic food purchases better than health or quality considerations: the complementarity between organic and fair trade products is strongest. In addition, the household's socioeconomic background influences secondary motivations.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) agricultural sales doubled in the United States between 1992 and 2007 and then plateaued between 2007 and 2012. It is not clear whether the plateau in sales was attributable to the recession, market saturation, an aging population, or other factors. We estimate the influence of socioeconomic factors in metropolitan areas on DTC agricultural sales between 1992 and 2012 in thirteen Northeast states using county-level panel data. We find that the income elasticity of DTC agricultural purchases ranged from 2.2 to 2.7 and that counties in metropolitan areas did not have higher DTC agricultural sales than other counties, ceteris paribus.

Super-premium fruit and vegetable juices and drinks are a rapidly emerging product subcategory. We use retail-level scanner data to analyze trends in sales of and demand for super-premium and other fruit and vegetable beverages. We find that super-premium beverages represent a small share—about 6 percent in terms of dollar sales in 2012—of the overall fruit and vegetable juice and drink market and are priced considerably higher. Total sales more than doubled between 2007 and 2012 with 16 percent annual growth, and the beverages were more responsive to changes in price than other fruit and vegetable juices and drinks.

Human fertility can affect agricultural production through its effect on supply of agricultural labor. Using the fact that in traditional, patriarchal societies, sons are generally preferred to daughters, we isolate exogenous variation in the number of children born to a mother and relate it to the agricultural labor supply and production in Uganda, which has a dominant agricultural sector and high fertility. We find that fertility has a sizable negative effect on household labor allocation to subsistence agriculture. Households with lower fertility devote significantly more time to land preparation and weeding; larger households grow less matooke and sweet potatoes. We find no significant effect on agricultural productivity in terms of yield per land area.