Brazilian Soybean Yields and Yield Gaps Vary with Farm Size
Abstract
Understanding the farm size-specific characteristics of crop yields and yield gaps may help to improve yields by enabling better targeting of technical assistance and agricultural development programs. Linking remote sensing-based yield estimates with property boundaries provides a novel view of the relationship between farm size and yield structure (yield magnitude, gaps, and stability over time). A growing literature documents variations in yield gaps, but largely ignores the role of farm size as a factor shaping yield structure. Research on the inverse farm size-productivity relationship (IR) theory - that small farms are more productive than large ones all else equal - has documented that yield magnitude may vary by farm size, but has not considered other yield structure characteristics. We examined farm size - yield structure relationships for soybeans in Brazil for years 2001-2015. Using out-of-sample soybean yield predictions from a statistical model, we documented 1) gaps between the 95th percentile of attained yields and mean yields within counties and individual fields, and 2) yield stability defined as the standard deviation of time-detrended yields at given locations. We found a direct relationship between soy yields and farm size at the national level, while the strength and the sign of the relationship varied by region. Soybean yield gaps were found to be inversely related to farm size metrics, even when yields were only compared to farms of similar size. The relationship between farm size and yield stability was nonlinear, with mid-sized farms having the most stable yields. The work suggests that farm size is an important factor in understanding yield structure and that opportunities for improving soy yields in Brazil are greatest among smaller farms.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.B51C1821J
- Keywords:
-
- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0430 Computational methods and data processing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0434 Data sets;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0480 Remote sensing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES