Data Training Webinar: U.S. and International Agricultural Productivity

Over the long term, improvement in agricultural productivity has been the world's primary means of assuring that the needs of a growing population are met by the capacity of the world’s resources to supply food.

One of the most informative measures of agricultural productivity is total factor productivity (TFP). Total factor productivity (TFP) measures the overall efficiency with which farmers transform agricultural market inputs (land, labor, capital, and material inputs such as fertilizer and feed) into agricultural outputs.

USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) provides information on TFP for the U.S. and other countries. The ERS Agricultural Productivity in the U.S. data product provides estimates of outputs, inputs, and TFP for the U.S. farm sector as far back as 1948. The ERS International Agricultural Productivity data product supports comparisons of agricultural productivity growth for countries and regions of the world beginning in 1961.

In this webinar, ERS Agricultural Economists Sun Ling Wang and Stephen Morgan provide overviews of the two data products and highlight uses of the data. They also demonstrate how to find the data on the ERS website.

Learn more about upcoming Data Training Webinars.