Fertilizer Use and Price Statistics, 1960-85

The rapid growth in fertilizer consumption throughout the sixties and seventies peaked at 23.7 million nutrient tons in 19R1. U.S. plant nutrient use has since dropped by varying amounts because of fewer crop acres and stabilizing application rates. By 19R,), plant nutrient use totaled 21.7 million tons. Farm fertilizer prices, while stable or declining during the sixties, have shown greater variability since 1974. Statistics in this bulletin include quarterly (or semiannual) time series for farm fertilizer prices, annual farm and wholesale fertilizer price indexes, fertilizer consumption by plant nutrient and major product, and consumption of mixed fertilizers, secondary nutrients, and micronutrients. Also included are annual statistics on fertilizer use per acre by nutrient in the major producing States for corn, cotton, soybeans, and wheat (1964-85)

Fertilizer Use and Price Statistics, 1960-88

The rapid growth in fertilizer consumption throughout the sixties and seventies peaked at 23.7 million nutrient tons in 19R1. U.S. plant nutrient use has since dropped by varying amounts because of fewer crop acres and stabilizing application rates. By 19R,), plant nutrient use totaled 21.7 million tons. Farm fertilizer prices, while stable or declining during the sixties, have shown greater variability since 1974. Statistics in this bulletin include quarterly (or semiannual) time series for farm fertilizer prices, annual farm and wholesale fertilizer price indexes, fertilizer consumption by plant nutrient and major product, and consumption of mixed fertilizers, secondary nutrients, and micronutrients. Also included are annual statistics on fertilizer use per acre by nutrient in the major producing States for corn, cotton, soybeans, and wheat (1964-85)

Impacts of the PIK Program on the Farm Machinery Market

Many analysts have claimed the record number of crop acres taken out of production in 1983 as a result of the Payment-in-Kind (PIK) program affected the already dechnmg sales offarm tractors The authors use intervention analysis, a particular form of a transfer function, to model and test for hypothesized changes in processes Three time senes (two two-wheel drive monthly sales classifications and one four-wheel drive sales classification).were modeled· as unwariate Autoregressive-Integrated-Moving-Average (ARIMA) processes These models were modified to incorporate the expected form of the PIK effects Results showed that PIK stgmficantly reduced unit sales of four-wheel drive tractors, but there was no statistical evidence of reduced sales for two-wheel drive tractor

Elasticities of Fertilizer Demands for Corn in the Short and the Long Run: A Cointegrated and Error-Correcting System.

Previous empirical models of fertilizer demand for corn or feedgrains production, which have been analyzed mainly within a static framework, indicate that the functions are price elastic or nearly price elastic. This result implies that taxes could be an effective policy tool to reduce nutrient use in agriculture. If application rates and independent variables are nonstationary, static regressions, which would then be misspecified dynamically, could result in a spurious relationship with inconsistent parameters. In this paper, we estimate a set of dynamic demand models for nitrogen, phosphate, and potash use in corn production, which accounts for nearly half of total U.S. fertilizer nutrient use. The results provide strong statistical evidence that nutrient demands for corn are price inelastic both in the short and the long run