News

Technology keeping ag geography steady

An ag economist is surprised the geographical spread of agriculture hasn’t changed more in the last 50 years. Ohio State University’s Carl Zulauf points to technology as the reason why.

“Technology has tended to be defused across the U.S.,” he said.

He said while improvements in areas like seed technology caused small geographical shifts, the improvements have boosted yields everywhere.

Zulauf tells Brownfield technology would also be the cause if different U.S. agriculture sectors become more area specific…

“If technology was to start to evolve and be much greater in certain areas, then that would tend to cause more concentration in the future,” Zulauf said.

While Zulauf said the last 50 years point to much of the same in the future, he compares predicting technology trends to predicting the weather.