3. My main point is that retail food prices are much more influenced by things like transportation costs, processing costs, marketing costs, wages, etc. than the raw farm level commodity costs. Every ag economist knows this (or should), but it is not well understood in general

Fun Twitter question: what was the first book when you stopped reading with zero guilt?

“If you work on #FoodSystems and #nutrition, you cannot not work on the #environment. That realization has set in for lots of people, including us,” - @l_haddad An interesting 📰 by TW on the relationship between nutrition and environment. Devex bit.ly/3dxzGN7

Well, one thing is clear: Lenin and the Soviets were enamored of American-style meat industrialization and saw what we would now call factory farming as a desirable form of food plenty and modernization. Source: LeBlanc (2017) jstor.org/stable/26362479

Broadly speaking, the norms and institutions of science in most fields are largely determined around how to produce the most knowledge out of the latest of communication and remote communication technology, circa 1800.

TWITTER COPS (1/4)

Last month, the average cost of plant-based meat (including beef and chicken products) in the Netherlands was reported to have finally dropped *below* (not just parity!) the average cost of their animal-derived equivalents per kg. foodnavigator.com/Article/2022/0…

My favorite iteration of this meme so far (although I haven't seen @waiterich's take on it yet)

ANOTHER paper in Science Magazine came out claiming a 33% increase in soy yield. Since my last “yield” tweet took off - lets do it again! From a (wanna be) plant breeder 5 years into my PhD, let me explain how this 33% increase in yield is misleading 🧵science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Now in Journal of Politics @[email protected]: How well do politicians understand public opinion? In a massive project led by Stefaan Walgrave (UAntwerpen), we asked 866 politicians in four countries to estimate public opinion on salient issues, collecting 10K unique estimations /1 journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/72…

Really exciting news from FCDO Research, Science and Technology. When I reviewed most costeffective uses of aid, ag research was one of the top return investments. As a global public good, its particularly suited for aid. Now lets do this for other crops!

Here are two of my adaptation papers that I still like! The farmer's climate change adaptation challenge in least developed countries escholarship.org/content/qt5b55…

Liberalism is not a matter of contract, nor is it the eternal onward march of progress. It is living in the consciousness that the bell always-- always-- tolls for thee.

A recent paper in Nature Food claimed that 'global food miles' were 20% of food emissions. And a move to local food was effective to address climate change. But this is incorrect. My article on the issues with this study & why this is not the case: researchgate.net/publication/36…

Air pollution from cars is terrifying. Just one Volkswagen diesel that cheated on emissions tests per 1,000 cars upped infant mortality by 1.7%! It shows "moderate amounts of car pollution impair population health at all pollution levels and across the socioeconomic spectrum."

An issue when comparing the average carbon footprint of food is that it hides the variation *within* a given food. But the key message doesn't change: the 'best' (lowest impact) meats still tend to emit more than the 'worst' plant-based foods. ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-s…

Love Apollo Academic Surveys' way of learning: a specialist identifies who & what to ask, then readers get to see the full range of scientific opinion. Some Qs yield consensus with outliers, others a uniform distribution over a range, & some views are polarized (bimodal). That's science!

Federal & state agricultural R&D is key to long-term advances in productivity, reductions in food prices, and climate mitigation, as our new Breakthrough report with modeling from Uris Baldos Purdue Ag Econ details. thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-ag…

A FAIRR panel at #COP27 today discussed work on a 1.5C roadmap for global agriculture similar to the International Energy Agency ‘Net Zero by 2050’ roadmap for energy. Dr Zitouni Ould-Dada, Deputy Director at FAO, confirmed work is underway at the FAO with the aim of publishing a roadmap by COP28.