Planting Biology

Since commodity market economics drive seeding decisions, adjustments are needed to account for new, and growing, economic incentives that can't be captured in traditional models.

This research series investigates and analyzes the increasing prevalence of agricultural program incentives and new marketing opportunities facing farmland owners. Ultimately, these are shifting the economic signals around the use of land to earn profits.

One of the shifts happening as a result of this new model for optimizing farmland’s profit potential is in the ways farmers decide what to seed. Unlike in the past – when yields, selling prices and expenses determined relative margins – there are new financial incentives for protecting and restoring biodiversity in farmland.

In the science of economics, when the over-arching objective changes, everything below it shifts in response. First, farming practices move into systems that are positive for the environment, which creates structural change in demand for individual crop inputs.

Especially in commodity markets where supply/demand/price relationships are linear, it’s a challenge to predict the trickle-down effects of imposing a new non-linear model. In the case of seed, we can start to string together how land use incentives are disrupting commodity market analysis and breeding objectives, leading to potential long-term mismatches between current assumptions and future value.