The Sacramento Bee ran a brief story in today's paper about new research that is being shared with the ag industry at a Sacramento symposium ending today. The research compared the rate of growth in public funding for agricultural research and the rate of growth in agricultural productivity. Both are dipping.
Reporter Jim Downing wrote in his article that governments around the world invested heavily in ag research from the 1950s through the 1970s, and farm productivity soared. Since the 1980s, though, research spending and productivity growth slowed.
The research Downing reported on, led by UC Davis ag economist Julian Alston, showed that ag productivity grew an average of 1.82 percent per year from 1949 to 2002. However, from 1990 to 2002, productivity grew at an average annual rate of 1.08 percent.