In July, ARE Faculty and Graduate Students attended the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA. During the annual meeting, Economics Ph.D. Student John Robinson earned second place in the AAEA Extension Competition for Graduate Students.
As a finalist in the Extension Competition, Robinson had the unique opportunity to develop and present an extension program derived from his research on the profitability of grain storage in North Carolina. His work was funded by a grant from the Corn Growers Association of North Carolina, on which Robinson serves as Co-PI with his advisor, Professor and Extension Specialist Nicholas Piggott.
To assess the returns to on-farm storage, Robinson and Piggott toured storage facilities across the state to capture how costs vary by climate and technological specifics. Additionally, information gained from these visits was used to estimate on-farm storage investment costs by parameterizing 308 distinct facilities.
This research is the first to assess whether increasing grain storage capacity is economically viable in grain-deficit markets such as North Carolina. Robinson and Piggott have found that on-farm storage not only improves post-harvest marketing opportunities but also facilitates harvest logistics by allowing growers to avoid congested delivery points at peak harvest periods. Robinson and Piggott are also the first to estimate the value of on-farm storage as a means of reducing crop loss in the event of harvest-time tropical cyclones for row crop growers in the US.
