A better understanding of crop yields under climate change
You don’t need a Ph.D. in agriculture to know that water is critical to crop production. But for years, people like Jonathan Proctor, who has a Ph.D. in Agriculture and Resource Economics from the University of California Berkeley, have been trying to explain why the importance of water isn’t showing up in statistical models of crop yield. … The research team had a hypothesis: What if the models were measuring the wrong type of water? Rather than measuring precipitation, as previous studies had done, the Harvard team used satellites to measure soil moisture around the root zone for maize, soybeans, millet, and sorghum growing around the world.
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