On the Changing Nature of Canadian Crop Yield Distributions

Abstract

Feeding nine billion people by 2050, yield resiliency, climate change, and remaining economically competitive have received significant attention in the literature. Technological change in agriculture will largely dictate our ability to meet these challenges. Although there is significant literature on technological change in U.S. crop yields, very little has been done with Canadian yields. Moreover, the adoption and effect of various technologies and their interaction with climate tend to be crop-region specific. To this end, we model the changing nature of county-level yields for barley, canola, corn, oats, soybean and wheat in Canada. We use mixtures to allow and test for heterogeneous rates of technological change within the yield data generating process. While we tend to find increasing but heterogeneous rates of technological change, increasing and asymmetric yield volatility, and increasing absolute but decreasing relative yield resiliency, our results do differ across crops and exhibit spatial bifurcations within a crop. Using a standard attribution model, we find changing climate has differing effects across crops. We also consider the public funding implications for Canadian Business Risk Management programs.