Measuring the relative importance of different agricultural inputs

We identify the agricultural inputs that drove the growth in global Background and regional crop yields from 1975 to the mid-2000s. : We compare Methods and contrast the inputs that drove yield change as identified by econometrically estimated yield functions and decision trees that use yield change as the class attribute. : We find that improvements in agricultural science and Results management, increased fertilizer use, and changes in crop mix around the world explained most of the gain in global crop yields, although the yield impacts of input use varied across the latitudinal gradient. Climate change over this time period caused yields to be only slightly lower than they would have been otherwise. In some cases, cropland extensification had as much of a negative impact on global and regional yields as climate change. : Conclusions To maintain the momentum in yield growth across the globe 1) the transfer of agricultural chemicals and investment in agricultural science and management in the tropics must increase rapidly and 2) international trade in agricultural products must expand significantly. This article is included in the Machine learning: life collection. sciences Erik Nelson ( ) Corresponding author: [email protected] No competing interests were disclosed. Competing interests: Nelson E and Congdon CB. How to cite this article: Measuring the relative importance of different agricultural inputs to global and 2016, :2930 (doi: regional crop yield growth since 1975 [version 1; referees: 2 approved with reservations] F1000Research 5 ) 10.12688/f1000research.10419.1 © 2016 Nelson E and Congdon CB. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Data associated Licence with the article are available under the terms of the (CC0 1.0 Public domain dedication). Creative Commons Zero "No rights reserved" data waiver The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work. Grant information: 29 Dec 2016, :2930 (doi: ) First published: 5 10.12688/f1000research.10419.1 1