An Empirical Investigation of Productivity Spillovers along the Agricultural Supply Chain

major engine of growth for U.S. agriculture in the post-war period, despite the methodological differences in the approaches used to calculate it.1 Furthermore, TFP growth in the farm sector compares very favorably to similar measures of productivity growth in other sectors of the U.S. economy (Kendrick and Grossman 1980; Jorgenson, Gollop, and Fraumeni 1987; Jorgenson and Schreyer 2013; Jorgenson, Ho, and Samuels 2014; Garner and others 2019). In particular, Jorgenson, Ho, and Samuels (2014) find that although the farm sector ranked 15th out of 65 industries in its contribution to national value-added from 1947 to 2010, it ranked fifth in its contribution to national productivity growth, accounting for 7.5 percent of total U.S. TFP growth over the same period. Using a different data set, Garner and others (2019) find that the farm sector ranked fourth in TFP growth across 63 industries in the United States from 1987 to 2016.2 Prior agricultural economics research has contributed to policy discussions on how to increase food, fiber, and, more recently, biofuel output using fewer inputs mostly by identifying endogenous drivers of agricultural productivity—and, to a lesser extent, by decomposing TFP changes into more meaningful economic terms that can be addressed An Empirical Investigation of Productivity Spillovers along the Agricultural Supply Chain