Most of the world’s crop production relies on the whims of the weather. Too much or too little water, temperatures that remain too high or too low – these are just some of the many factors that can negatively impact agricultural yields. Events like these can cause high crop volatility – rapid and significant fluctuations in the price of produce.  A researcher at Purdue has been using his U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS-allocation on Anvil, Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) supercomputer, to study crop volatility from a different angle.

In addition to focusing on how factors such as extreme heat affect crop production, Iman Haqiqi, lead research economist in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, is studying how global trade can offset crop volatility. The results of his research have shown that not only does trade help buffer the risk of crop volatility due to heat stress, but it also mitigates this risk without depleting groundwater supplies.

“So the whole idea of this paper was to show that, yes, there are some temporary solutions, like irrigation, but they are not sustainable,” says Haqiqi. “Something else, like international trade, which is a solution from an economic perspective, can have a similar effect in terms of reducing volatility and risk. But also, it has benefits because you don’t need to have a lot of unsustainable use of resources.”

Without Anvil, this paper would be just a conceptual framework that, hey, you know, trade could be a good thing compared to irrigation. But we didn’t have numerical evidence to support that claim. Now, thanks to having access to Anvil, we could provide that evidence.

–Iman Haqiqi, Purdue University

Haqiqi’s use of ACCESS-allocated resources, which included support from RCAC’s team of high-performance computing (HPC) experts, helped him quickly perform the computational aspects of his research. With HPC, researchers like Haqiqi have the resources to perform computationally intensive models, simulations and calculations.

Haqiqi’s research was published in the journal Environmental Research: Food Systems. You can find more details about this research in the original article posted here: Anvil used to study how trade can reduce volatilities in crop supply.

Resource Provider Institution(s): Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC)
Resources Used: Anvil
Affiliations: Purdue University
Funding Agency: NSF 
Grant or Allocation Number(s): EES220011

The science story featured here was enabled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.