Getting Started

Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Local Time: 8:48 AM
Madison Time: 12:48 AM

Welcome! Thank you for visiting my blog "From the Ground Up: Exploring Global Breadbaskets." I will be using this site to document my research trip to Russia and France where I will be collecting information on the winter wheat cropping systems of the Southern Federal District (Russia) and Picardie (France) - two of the most important wheat growing regions in the world.

This work stemmed from a global-scale study published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography in which colleagues and I - at the Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison - compared the yields across regions with similar growing climates. We did so for 18 different crops, using global yield and harvested area datasets representing conditions circa the year 2000, as well as monthly climatology data from the CRU. By comparing yields within similar climates, we were able to determine the maximum yield currently being achieved in different types of climate, as well as how the actual yields of regions compare with their "maximum climatic potential", or, their "yield gap".

In the study published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, we observed a striking gap in the yields of several crops between Eastern and Western Europe. Since we had in effect controlled for climate, we hypothesize that the range in yields between the two regions is due to other factors, such as land management practices and crop varieties/genetics. We have decided to test this hypothesis through a suite of case studies on winter wheat in the Southern Federal District and Picardie. I am therefore setting out to collect information on the major characteristics of the winter wheat cropping systems in these regions, to understand how they compare with one another, and what the major constraints to winter wheat productivity are. I will collect information through interviews with winter wheat experts ranging from commodity industry executives, university researchers, and crop consultants, as well as through interviews with winter wheat growers themselves. I will be traveling for approximately 7 weeks across Russia and France, where I will be collaborating with Dr. Alexander Prishchepov of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Thierry Dore, and Dr. David Makowski of INRA-AgroParisTech.

My first stop is to Moscow where I will meet up with Alexander and begin to speak with experts who can speak to winter wheat production patterns in the regions we will be visiting. Please join me on this journey by following my posts. I welcome thoughts, reactions, ideas, and comments. For now, off to Russia!