Food prices

After several years of pandemic-driven price spikes at the grocery store, retail food price inflation is slowing down. That’s good news for consumers, especially those in low-income households, who spend a proportionally larger share of their income on food. But there’s more to the cost of food than what we pay at the store. Producing, processing, transporting and marketing food creates costs all along the value chain. Many are borne by society as a whole or by communities and regions. For example, farm runoff is a top cause of algae blooms and dead zones in rivers, lakes and bays. And food waste takes up one-fourth of the space in U.S. landfills, where it rots, generating methane that warms Earth’s climate. Exploring these lesser-known costs is the first step toward reducing them. The key is a method called true cost accounting, which examines the economic, environmental, social and health impacts of food production and consumption to produce a broader p...

When an explosion breached the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine on June 6, 2023, much analysis focused on near-term impacts, including the flooding of the city of Kherson, threats to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and consequences for Ukrainian military forces’ expected spring offensive against Russian troops. But the most severe long-term effects will fall on Southeast Ukraine’s farmers. Villages there were flooded. Roads, train tracks and irrigation canals were washed away. Crops in fields and orchards in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia region were inundated, then left to shrivel after the water drained. The long-term ecological disaster will unfold over decades to come. Crimea, once a region known for its sunny beaches and rice fields, could dry up without irrigation. We are a U.S. political scientist with research expertise on the post-Soviet region and a Ukrainian economist who studies agriculture. While the long-term effects of the dam break are difficult to calcu...

Milton Orr looked across the rolling hills in northeast Tennessee. “I remember when we had over 1,000 dairy farms in this county. Now we have less than 40,” Orr, an agriculture adviser for Greene County, Tennessee, told me with a tinge of sadness. That was six years ago. Today, only 14 dairy farms remain in Greene County, and there are only 125 dairy farms in all of Tennessee. Across the country, the dairy industry is seeing the same trend: In 1970, over 648,000 U.S. dairy farms milked cattle. By 2022, only 24,470 dairy farms were in operation. While the number of dairy farms has fallen, the average herd size – the number of cows per farm – has been rising. Today, more than 60% of all milk production occurs on farms with more than 2,500 cows. Dairy farm numbers have fallen over the past few decades, but larger farms have kept the overall number of cows fairly steady. USDA Thi...