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Assessing agricultural policy in the twenty-first century: Who benefits from Agricultural Subsidies? What happened after tobacco quota ended in Kentucky? - October 25th, 2012
Brady Deaton Jr.: Welcome to FARE Talk, where we set out to provide enduring discussions on contemporary topics relevant to our economy, with particular emphasis on food, agriculture, and the environment. My name is Brady Deaton, Jr. of the Department of Food, Agriculture, and Resource Economics at the University of Guelph. I'll be your host. Barrett Kirwan is an assistant professor in the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois. Barrett, welcome to FARE Talk.
Barrett Kirwan: Happy to be here.
Brady Deaton Jr: I think the issues that you are examining, ag subsidies and the effective quota, are really critical to understanding both the historic and the future effects of ag policy. I want to start by discussing your first article, which was published in the Journal of Political Economy.
Barrett Kirwan: Okay.
Brady Deaton Jr: Which examined the incidence of US agricultural subsidies on farmland rental rates. You make a point that a primary goal of US agriculture policy is to support farmer income. Why does it lead you to examine the issue of rental rates?
Barrett Kirwan: The traditional theory, the story that I've always heard was that the subsidies get capitalized into the land value. I grew up on a farm in Idaho where we rented most of our land and so the idea that all the subsidies were getting capitalized into the land value meant that the subsidies was going to the landlord, who was not a farmer. It got me thinking about why are we giving all this money to landlords? I naturally looked at rental rates.
Brady Deaton Jr: I think the idea of that the public wants to support farmers is generally accepted, but the idea that that support could be going to landowners, many of whom are not necessarily farmers, that may be an issue of more debate. Were you surprised when you started looking into the data on farmland ownership, farmers versus non-farmer owners of farmland?
Barrett Kirwan: I was. In fact, I didn't realize that there were so many non-farmer owned acres. It turned out that during the time period that I'm looking at, about 45% of the farmland in the US is not owned by a farmer. It's owned by a non-farmer. I was surprised that the number was that big. It seemed to make the issue much more important.
Brady Deaton Jr: Why then ... Let's talk a little bit about the theory. You mentioned that you had heard this story that the value of any increase in farmer income would get bid into the, or capitalized, into the value of farmland. Break that story down for me a little bit. How do economists generally make this argument. Why is that a story that you heard before?
Barrett Kirwan: This I think was something I heard growing up just talking, listening to farmers, but then getting into economics, it was probably one of the very first theories that I learned that if you have an input into production and that input has no elasticity, it's unresponsive, but will the rents will ultimately go to that input. I think it may have been in my very first semester of microeconomics that I learned about Ricardian rents and this idea that ... Farmland was the example that was given and this idea that the more productive farmland that is given, earned, returns above what's the average land would earn. This idea that any productivity that the land has gets capitalized into this value, and if you think about subsidies, it's just, in terms of value, it's just adding to the value of what's being created from the land. Because the land isn't [inaudible 00:04:23], the subsidies get captured by the landowner.
Brady Deaton Jr: When you were reviewing the literature on this, did you find a lot of empirical work that had researched this question? There was a theory here that if I have a more productive farm and I'm renting that out, that I'm going to charge more for it. I'm going to get more money for it, and if you have a policy that provides more profits, than I'm going to capture the value of that policy, but had there been a lot of studies that empirically examine this question?
Barrett Kirwan: Surprisingly there haven't. There are a couple very early studies that actually looked at tobacco quotas [inaudible 00:05:05] a subject that [inaudible 00:05:07] we're going to talk about today, but they were looking at tobacco quota in terms of, as an asset, does the value of a quota get capitalized into the value too. The subsidy gets capitalized into the quota itself. Based on that early work, it confirmed what economists had presumed and it's funny, but it seems like that was about all they needed. From then on, it was just everybody knew that some, almost all of the subsidy would go to the landlord, and the amount of empirical research on it though was really quite small. It was a little bit surprising.
Brady Deaton Jr.: It's somewhat surprising also that policies that were designed to help farmers would persist in light of that theory, especially when we started to understand that so much, nearly 50%, or you say 45%, of the farmland wasn't owned by farmers. I wonder if people just didn't understand the degree of non-farmer ownership of farmland or whether they really accepted that basic tenet.
Barrett Kirwan: Yeah. I'm not sure. I think that was one of the things that was most disturbing to me, and even before I knew the extent to which the farmland was rental land, it just didn't seem right to me that ... It seemed liked decades you had agricultural economists testifying before Congress, telling them that these subsidies are ineffective, they go to the landowners, and Congress never really responding. I wanted to dig into that. Either way, because the theory is not true, that's interesting. If it's because the theory is true and somehow the landowners have more political power, and that's what's driving policy, that's interesting too. That was one of my key curiosities in getting into it.
Brady Deaton Jr.: All right, what do we need to know? Now you study different policy periods. It seems to me the one you describe, and maybe you could just give us a basic overview of those policy periods, but it seems to me that in each case, you're concerned about explaining whether or not the landlord and the tenant could anticipate the amount of subsidy that would be paid and maybe you could describe that subsidy, and also the magnitude of that subsidy.
Barrett Kirwan: Right. One of the big issues during this time period was the decoupling, as they've called it, of farm payments where it went from a period where the subsidy was dependent on the price of the commodity. If the price was low, the subsidy would be high, and vice versa, if the price were high. They turned it into a subsidy that was not dependent on the price and not dependent on production. The idea was that there's this niche timing in terms of you sign a rental contract in the spring, but you don't really know the price or the subsidy that you're going to receive until the fall. In the beginning when there was this uncertainty about the price, it wasn't clear that you would actually find ... The empirical result would actually be valid because you didn't know what the farmer was anticipating. As time went on, as the subsidy became less dependent on the price of production, it became much more certain to the farmer in the spring and to the landowner what the subsidy would be.
Over time, you could see that the likelihood that the subsidy would get bid into the cash rental rate would have increased because the farmer would've been more certain about the subsidy that was going to be paid at the end of the year. Trying to I guess "fix" that problem at the beginning, and then using later periods to verify that that fix works, that was part of the work into the paper.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Right. Just [inaudible 00:09:47] maybe one example, in the 1996 Federal Agricultural Improvement Reform Act, before that, how would a landlord ... What would a landlord and tenant have known about the subsidy, before that reform act of 1996? What would they have known about the subsidy that the operator or the farmer actually working the land would have gotten?
Barrett Kirwan: Probably the most important, in my eyes, the most important thing that they would've known in the ... Not only was the subsidy dependent on the price, but the subsidy was attached to a specific acre of land, and the subsidy also depended on the productivity of that land. Before 1996, they might have a general good idea about the price based on future prices and their expected bases [inaudible 00:10:49] may have been able to form some pretty good expectations that way, but in terms of the analysis, knowing that you have a more productive piece of land that ... As a landlord, your more productive piece of land is being rented out. Not only can you charge more because it's more productive, but you could charge more because the subsidy is a function of that productivity. The subsidy's going to be even greater on the production land than it is on the less productive land. Being able to control for that actually, being able to account for the fact that a lot of the variation we see in the subsidy is caused by the productivity of the land. Early on, that was I think one of the key insights into answering this question.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Right. For those listeners, there's a lot of effort in this paper given to the technical aspects of measuring them, and I'm sure we're not going to do it justice in this podcast, but there will be a link to this paper and the second paper we're going to discuss. It's worth taking a look at exactly, for those of you who are interested exactly how Barrett tries to take into account of these differences. After 1996, it was a little different, right? After the-
Barrett Kirwan: Right.
Brady Deaton Jr.: ... Fair reform. How is that?
Barrett Kirwan: Right. After 1996, everything from the analyst's perspective got easier, but after 1996, the subsidy was just essentially frozen at the 1996 level. Now it was on a schedule that was supposed to decline, and by 2002, there was supposed to be an end of those subsidies, but because it was frozen and fixed, not only did the tenant and farmer know how much the subsidy would be, but everybody else did as well. It became more possible for other farmers to know how much the subsidy's going to be and start bidding against the farmer who already rents the land, and it's that competitive bidding process that one would expect that subsidy to get capitalized into the rental rate. Having great [assurity 00:13:04] that that was going to happen increased the likelihood that that subsidy would be captured by the landowner instead of the farmer.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Right. After 1996, everybody knows what the subsidy's going to be. I'm a landlord and a tenant calls me up and gives me a rental price. We both then, with certainty, basically know what the farmer, operator, or the tenant is going to get in terms of subsidies. So does everyone else.
Barrett Kirwan: Exactly.
Brady Deaton Jr.: If they bid too low, someone else comes along and bids a little bit higher. You're really expecting then after this 1996 to have a much clearer insight into the effect of subsidies on rental rates, is that right?
Barrett Kirwan: Exactly. Yeah, which solves as many of the technical problems.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Right.
Barrett Kirwan: I think it makes the conclusion the answer that I get. Very interesting.
Brady Deaton Jr.: All right, let's get to that. Let's get to your conclusions and your answers, but before we do that, break down in general the data you got and the general method. I know you used a fixed [inaudible 00:14:17] method, but we're talking about cash rent and-
Barrett Kirwan: Right.
Brady Deaton Jr.: ... We're talking about things that happen over a different time period, so maybe just walk us through that.
Barrett Kirwan: Okay. Part of I guess the fun of writing this paper was that I managed to get access to farm level data from the USDA. I had access to the micro files of the [inaudible 00:14:43] of Agriculture, which took a lot of work, especially since I had to be in a room in Washington, DC, a specific room, in order to use the date. I was at the time living in Boston. It made it a little bit tricky. Having access to those farm level data really allowed me to look at this relationship between the productivity of the farm and what the farmer expected in their subsidy. It turns out that that's really vital because if you ignore that and you just look at a county level map with darker shading for areas that get higher subsidies, it matches very closely to a map that looks at the rental rate for the land where a darker color would be a higher rental rate. Looking at that, it looks like there's a very clear relationship, but what that ignores is that underlying productivity of that land. By getting down to the farm level and being able to control more specifically for the productivity on a very specific piece of land, once you control for that productivity because this productivity is really what's driving the rental rate and it so happens that the productivity is also [inaudible 00:16:05] the subsidy, once you control for that, the relationship really falls apart. That was very surprising. I guess the funnest part was getting those microdata and then being able to do something that everybody knew that needed to be done and everybody would have liked to been able to do, but without those microdata through a time period, I had to use multiple years of the census and connect farms over time in order to be able to do this, getting those data was really the fundamental part of answering the questions.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Okay. The key thing here is the amount of subsidy is going to be associated with the productivity and so is the rental rate, is that right?
Barrett Kirwan: Right.
Brady Deaton Jr.: You're able to control for that productivity, which other people weren't able to control for, and that's going to allow you to better understand who's capturing the incidence of this subsidy.
Barrett Kirwan: Right.
Brady Deaton Jr.: What did you find?
Barrett Kirwan: I found that contrary to what has been presumed for decades, that instead of the full subsidy dollar going to the landlord, and I guess here I should mention that there are several different kinds of subsidies in the US, and I was focused on one specific subsidy, the one that we "decoupled." It was one that was really attached to the land. There's another production subsidy that's not attached to a specific piece of land, but just based on the farmer's total production. I was essentially ignoring that one. I got lucky because the time period of the investigation, those production subsidies were really small and almost all of the subsidy was coming through this land-specific subsidy. I found that instead of the landowner getting the full subsidy dollar, that in fact they were only getting something like 20 cents out of subsidy dollars. It wasn't even close. It wasn't even yeah, they get most of the subsidy dollar.
It was so low it took me hours to actually ... I guess it's funny now that I look back on it, but it probably took me twice as long to write the paper because the conclusion was so different than I had anticipated or anyone else had anticipated. I had to keep going through it and checking it, and getting more data, and making sure that I didn't make a dumb [inaudible 00:18:45] mistake somewhere and make sure this is really what's happening. Only 20 cents of the subsidy dollar is getting passed through to the landlord via the rental rate.
Brady Deaton Jr.: I guess I don't know if mentioned it, we should probably make it explicit. The subsidy works, it goes directly to the operator on the land, right?
Barrett Kirwan: Right, yeah. I guess that's, yeah, that's important it turns out.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Yeah, okay.
Barrett Kirwan: If a check gets mailed to the operator, whether or not the operator owns the land, it gets mailed to the farmer who's physically growing their crops, and that's who receives the checks. The only way that the landlord, through cash rental rates, the only way the landlord could get the subsidy is by raising the rental rate.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Right, but the theory had been, the theory is I think to some extent, that under these competitive conditions, under this inelastic assumption about supply of farmland, that the landlord would capture that subsidy. In a way, your finding is surprising from that sense, but I wonder from the other sense that we discussed earlier, from the political economy sense, the fact that these persisted for so long and the goal of that policy was to help farmers, maybe you solved a bit of a conundrum there.
Barrett Kirwan: Right, exactly. It almost seems like everybody else was in on the secret except for the ag economists. The congressmen know that their constituency was okay with the subsidy and they weren't worried about it being passed onto landlords, even though Congress kept saying that no, it's really the landlords that are benefiting from this. One really interesting thing, as we thought about why this resulted, one interesting thing is whenever I've presented this paper, I always, and it's funny because every single time there's been at least one person who has come up to me after the presentation and told me a story about a relationship that they or their mother or their neighbor has with the landlord and how important that relationship is. Having this I guess cold or this market mechanism determining the rental rate, the stories that I kept hearing was no, of course it's not the market that's determining it. It's these personal relationships. That becomes really difficult to measure.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Yeah, actually I should say your research has inspired several of us here to examine that issue in Canada. There's similar story in some respects. A great deal of the farmland is rented and a great deal, it appears with more analysis of the land that's being rented is not necessarily owned by people that other farmers identify as farmers. There's a lot of ... Maybe the issue of land ownership and non-farmer ownership of farmland I think is going to persist as a question continually as we try to develop ag policies that generally-
Barrett Kirwan: Places like Illinois and I'm learning [inaudible 00:21:56] lived here for a few years, but the vast majority of land here is not owned by the farmer. As any time goes by [inaudible 00:22:04] even fewer acres are actually owned by the farmer.
Brady Deaton Jr.: I found that data on that in your paper alone to just make the paper worth reading. It was just really a succinct gathering and discussion of that issue and [inaudible 00:22:17] subsidies and the relationship between the theory or abstraction of what's going on, and then testing our theory, which is really important, and then finding a finding that seemed consistent with what you would expect given the persistence of these policies to support farmers. Your story in some ways is a good news story. These policies have been passed on to operators. Former operators. I'd like to move to a second paper that you've written, which our colleagues, Shinsuki Uchida and Kirk White, that was just recently published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. The title of that is "Aggregate and Farm-Level Productivity Growth in Tobacco: Before and After the Quota Buy Out."
I think there was a couple of ties, other than ... First obvious tie is that you were involved in both papers, but the second one is it's tackling a real important policy issue. It's a very important policy issue in Canada. The third, which I thought is interesting, is again as you mentioned, at the time, before quota was bought out or the quota program ended in Kentucky, most of this quota wasn't, or a great portion of this quota wasn't owned by people who were necessarily producing tobacco.
Barrett Kirwan: Yeah. Right. The inception of this paper, the idea was how to [inaudible 00:23:52] the funnest lunchtime meetings I've ever had with Kirk White. We started talking about different ways to assess the effect that subsidies were having on productivity or production. Are [inaudible 00:24:08] production decisions and that makes it [inaudible 00:24:11] unproductive farmers in production. It's just really brainstorming and coming up with how would we answer that question, which was really, really fun. This is [inaudible 00:24:22].
Brady Deaton Jr.: I want to just begin with ... I love the first sentence of the paper. The Tobacco Transition Act of 2004 ended a 66-year-old federal farm program and replaced it with nothing.
Barrett Kirwan: Yeah.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Let's start there. Where does this study take place, what was going on before and after 2004?
Barrett Kirwan: The tobacco quota program ... One of the oldest I guess subsidy technology programs. It originated in the 1930s, in certain new deal registration. It was one of the attempts to address low and falling prizes by limiting production. Tobacco producers agreed to limit their production based on a quota system. Over time, that system evolved to where the quota, the right to produce a specific amount of tobacco was no longer part of the land that was being used. Those two things got separated. The quota became separate assets from the farmer, but in Kentucky, some of the restrictions about where that quota could be used stayed in place. The quota had to be used inside the county in which it was originally issued. That in and of itself is going to keep tobacco grown where it may not over time keep productive to grow it, but then [inaudible 00:26:03] the whole tobacco settlement issue and everything be I guess. [inaudible 00:26:11] the government wanted to get out of supporting tobacco prices. A few years before ... In 2004, the government bought all of their quota from the ... Basically paid off the farmers and eliminated this production.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Did that come from taxpayers or was that a settlement? Do you know how ... What financed that buy out?
Barrett Kirwan: Yeah, it was settlement dollars [inaudible 00:26:38].
Brady Deaton Jr.: Okay. We're in Kentucky and if I want to produce tobacco and there's not enough quota in my particularly country, let's say that I'm in [inaudible 00:26:53] County, and I want to produce more quota, I can't borrow from another county. I can't borrow from Allesley County let's say.
Barrett Kirwan: Right.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Okay.
Barrett Kirwan: You look at the productivity of the land in Kentucky. In the east, you have the Appalachian Mountains that are, soil's not great, and in the west, you've got some really productive soil. If you were in the west, you would prefer to buy some quota from the east. [inaudible 00:27:22] in the east, I think you would prefer to sell your quota because it would be so much more valuable in the west, but these county restrictions [inaudible 00:27:31] limited that.
Brady Deaton Jr.: That's important. The idea is that they're these gains from trade, the same idea that your kids can sit down after Halloween and trade their candy with each other and be better off with a fixed amount of candy because one likes chocolate, another likes peanut butter. The same way as if I'm a more productive farmer and I'm a different region, if I can get quota, then I can produce more and pay you the less productive farmer. You're better off as well.
Barrett Kirwan: Exactly. There are different dimensions of productivity. You might be a very productive farmer, but you're stuck with quota in the eastern half of the state so that ultimately, the land's not as productive as you are, but you can't take good quota and move.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Now just to re-emphasize this, about at the time, probably initially, and my grandfather had tobacco quota and it was in land, and then it got decoupled if you will from land, and into pounds that they could sell, but at some point in your paper, and I guess I mentioned this at the beginning, but the quota owner and the tobacco grower are not necessarily the same thing, just like the land owner and the farmer operator.
Barrett Kirwan: Yes, it's very much the same way where the tobacco quota owner and the tobacco producer are typically two different people.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Did the quota owners, when the buyout occurred, did both the quota owners and the producers receive a payment or was it only to the quota owners?
Barrett Kirwan: Some of the interesting dynamics that we find in the paper that is just completely counterintuitive, unless you understand the policy, was that a few years before in 2004, before the quota was bought out, it was announced that they would pay both the owner and the producer, but if you were a producer who also owned the tobacco quota, and you would get a bonus. It was this producer bonus that actually caused a lot of these non-farmer tobacco quota owners to become tobacco farmers for a few years in order to capture that bonus. That drives a really weird dynamic that you see in the data.
Brady Deaton Jr.: They would've known, these owners would've known that there was going to be a payment to both the owner and the operator?
Barrett Kirwan: Right, yeah, because it was announced and the payment schedule was from the set years in advance of the ultimate buy out in 2004. You see a couple of things. You see the least rates for the quota increased during this time period because suddenly, you were getting [inaudible 00:30:38] work more, and the productivity of the ... The average productivity of tobacco farmers fell as more of these non-farmers decided to take up farming for a few years in order to get the bonus. You see, it's a really weird dynamic where the productivity falls, and at the same time, the price of the rental rates for the quota increases are all being driven by the anticipation of the policy.
Brady Deaton Jr.: After the quota buy out, what are the general dynamics? What happens in the tobacco growing sector?
Barrett Kirwan: Right. It's just a time when we have all these smoking bans in public places and the demand for tobacco within the US is just falling precipitously during this time period. Even if there was no policy change, the number of tobacco farms was decreasing greatly, but what you see that, yeah, it's that in Kentucky, the fall ... Again, it's very clear that there were a lot of people who are just hanging on until 2004. In 2004, you get this precipitous drop in the number of tobacco producers. At the same time, you get this huge reallocation where in some counties, almost all of the tobacco production stops. In the east, you get a lot less tobacco production and in the west, you also get less tobacco production just because this demands is going down, but you get relatively more. You can see basically all of the tobacco quota. [inaudible 00:32:26]. You see, all of this relocation where people who had been constrained on how much they could produce because of the limited number of quotas in their county. Suddenly, those particular farmers would stop producing a lot more in the west, while in the east, you just saw tobacco farms just shutting down and the barns being used for something different.
Brady Deaton Jr.: One of the things I thought was really interesting in your discussion here was this distinction between people who continued on in tobacco production in 2017.
Barrett Kirwan: Yeah. That honestly caught us just as a bit of concern and just how to deal with that because we actually saw people entering and in the data, we see people becoming tobacco producers during this time when there's just precipitous drop in demand. We get a lot of exiters, people leaving, but you also get several entrance where people who are no longer ... I'm sorry. Who previously didn't have access to quota, since there was no requirement, we're able to answer tobacco production. Yeah, this strange dynamic going on between the productive farmers who want to grow tobacco and the unproductive farmers who are happy to get rid of their quota and retire on the payout.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Right. Now we're going to talk about your results. You talk about your results in terms of agriculture productivity growth, and I think that's where I wouldn't mind ending the discussion, reviewing your findings in terms of that, but for a more general audience, how should we think about these findings when we say that was an increase in agriculture productive growth. What do we mean by that term.
Barrett Kirwan: I think it's important to keep in mind that if the difference between production, growth, and productivity growth because production is falling everywhere, but at a specific farm level, and again, we had benefits of using farm-level data in this analysis. At the farm, an individual farmer, can produce more tobacco. That's productivity growth. Individuals using essentially the same inputs [inaudible 00:34:57] to produce more output than something's happened to the productivity, technology has changed, their knowledge [inaudible 00:35:05] something has changed. That's what we call productivity growth. For it to be I think about it is the productivity is more individual producer aspects of production, where production itself is an overall aggregation of cross producers. Yeah, we're looking at how does the productivity of the individual producer change during this time period?
Brady Deaton Jr.: I'd like to move on to discussing your results, but before that, let's review the time periods that you're examining with your empirical analysis.
Barrett Kirwan: Right. Again, this is limited by the data [inaudible 00:35:47] agriculture every five years. We take a look at what's the trend and what's going on in tobacco before the buyout happens. We looked from 1997 to 2002. Leaving two years of [inaudible 00:36:01] agriculture to get a sense of what's going on. Not surprisingly, there's not much growth in productivity there. What's interesting I guess is that we, and we did struggle with this for a while, is that we actually find negative productivity growth. We thought we [inaudible 00:36:22] because how can you decline in productivity and continue to produce. This is where it really became apparent that there were farmers who really shouldn't have been producing, but were producing because the incentive to get this extra payment if you're a producer. We think that the negative overall [inaudible 00:36:47] we find in that time period being driven by these other people who are hanging on entering when they really don't have the skills or the equipment perhaps.
In the second time period, we look at 2002 to 2007. A period that bridges those 2004 buy out and see how the productivity changes there. What we find is there's a relatively huge productivity growth where productivity increases by 44% during this time period. During across the buyout time periods.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Productivity changes what, how do you break them down then. What's causing that change in productivity after the quota buy out.
Barrett Kirwan: Our intent is to [inaudible 00:37:33] like you said, is just break that [inaudible 00:37:36] number down into the different. See how much of this is because of the removal of the quota. In some sense, our target is what we call reallocated efficiency, or it's [inaudible 00:37:52] where it's searching for it. If we reallocate the inputs, and in this sense, we're thinking about moving production from unproductive regions to more productive regions. If you allow that to happen cross county boundaries, how much does that contribute to productivity growth, and that really is our fundamental measure of the distortion, because if there were no distortions, productivity growth is going to come from entering and exit. It's going to come from technical progress, but it's not going to come from moving the inputs around because if there's no barrier, you would've already moved them around. We decompose it into how much of the growth is caused by unproductive people exiting versus more productive farmers entering. How much is caused by just the technical change in efficiency? How much is caused by the reallocations, which is a measure of distortion. It [inaudible 00:39:01]. We find that the reallocation is a big chunk of the productivity growth that we observed.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Barrett, I really enjoyed this conversation, and I've learned a lot. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Barrett Kirwan: Thank you, Brady. It's been a pleasure. I hope it's been insightful.
Brady Deaton Jr.: Yes. Thanks again. Thank you very much.
Barrett Kirwan: Thanks.
Speaker: You've been listening to FARE Talk with Brady Deaton, Jr. at the Department of Food, Agriculture, and Resource Economics at the University of Guelph. Thanks for joining us.
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