Sandbox

Crop Production

Crop production is most simply a product of the land under cultivation (cropland) and the crop yield per hectare of land. Yield is determined in a Cobb-Douglas type production function, the inputs to which are agricultural capital, labor, and technical change. Technical change is conceptualized as being responsive to price signals, but the model uses food stocks in the computation to enhance control over the temporal dynamics of responsiveness.  Specifically, technology responds to the imbalance between desired and actual food stocks globally.  In addition there is a direct response of yield change to domestic food stocks that represents not so much technical change as farmer behavior in the fact of market conditions (e.g. planting more intensively). Overall, basic annual yield growth is bound by the maximum of the initial model year's yield growth and an exogenous parameter of maximum growth.[[File:Crop production.png|border|right|564x476px|Crop production]] This basic yield function is further subject to a saturation factor that is computed internally to the model̶–investments in increasing yield are subject to diminishing rather than constant returns to scale. Moreover, changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) will affect agricultural yields both directly through CO₂ and indirectly through changes in temperature and precipitation. Finally, the user can rely on parameters to increase or decrease yield patterns indirectly with a multiplier or to use parameters to control the saturation effect and the direct and indirect effects of CO₂ on crop yield.