By Jordan Powers
For more than two decades, the Georgia Farm Gate Value Report has offered a comprehensive analysis of the county-level production value for commodities in Georgia’s No. 1 industry, agriculture.
The reports provide essential data to the state’s farmers and present University of Georgia Cooperative Extension agents with a resource to interact and build relationships with producers in the state’s 159 counties.
Now the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES) is providing Georgia’s farmers with a new tool: Georgia Farm Gate Value 20-Year Trends.
Agricultural trends in Georgia
While the annual farm gate reports share insight on rankings and dollar value data for Georgia’s commodities, the new farm gate trends will instead look at percent change across more than 20 years of data.
“Using percent change gives an idea of trends, which can tell us more of a story than the numbers,” said Ben Campbell, associate professor in the CAES Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics and UGA Extension coordinator.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the nursery-greenhouse industry responded well — people were isolating at home, and purchasing plants became one of the many ways to pass time and cope.
Meanwhile, trends show that the nursery-greenhouse industry was decimated during the Great Recession, while vegetable commodities did surprisingly well, because at the end of the day, everyone needs to eat, Campbell said.
“From a policy standpoint at the Capitol or a planning standpoint on the farm, you can’t treat all crops the same, because they are not,” he said. “One size fits all is not effective in agricultural policy or planning — it has to be viewed commodity by commodity.”
Over 20 years of data show industry resilience
The trend reports will break the state’s 76-plus commodities into six groups: row and forage crops; blueberries and pecans; nursery and greenhouse; vegetables; cattle, hay and poultry; and hospitality and agrotourism. There will also be a trend report on Georgia agriculture overall.
Each report begins with a summary of trends for key crops within the commodity group followed by highlighted graphs of trends for the crops with data from 2001 to 2022. All data has been inflation adjusted to 2020.
“The data speaks to the fact that agriculture in Georgia is consistent,” said Jared Daniel, data coordinator in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics. “The ag industry is important and here to stay.”
Daniel, who earned his bachelor’s degree in agribusiness and his master’s degree in agricultural and applied economics from CAES before taking a role as an agent with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, added that while producers may stress about changes in the market or events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Recession, the key is focusing on the long term — especially good business management and profitability — over numbers from any single given year.
“For producers, what we’re really seeing with these trends is that things will recover. It takes time, and the amount of time is always the biggest variable,” Campbell added. “We think worst-case scenario, that something will kill an industry, but it comes back. It always does.”
Jordan Powers is the public relations coordinator and writer for UGA’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
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