We assembled qualitative and anecdotal data to determine in which counties tea is produced in China. We would like to give credit to Dr. Wenyan Han at the Tea Research Institute at the Chinese Ministry of Agricultural Science and Meng Bian, a doctoral student at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, for helping us to determine anecdotally/qualitatively the counties in which tea is produced in China.

Overall, we found that yields across all provinces in China are increasing over time. However, the variability of yields by province has also increased over time (see chart below).

We calculated the average provincial yield (tons/ha) from 1984 to 2009.  Fujian, Zheijiang, Guangxi, and Hunan province have the highest average 25-year yield over the time period (see map below).

In 2009, Fujian, Sichuan, Guangdong, and Hainan province had the highest yield (tons/ha) in 2009 (see map below).

Unfortunately, we have yet to assemble a county-level data set on yield. Although we look forward to working with Dr. Han and others to assemble this data.

Dr. Selena Ahmed is Project Coordinator and has expertise in how climate change impacts tea quality attributes and production. She is also interested in the resilience of tea agro-forest systems in the face of climate change. She has traveled extensively to Yunnan Province and worked with farmers there to understand tea ecosystems. Our research team also includes Dr. Colin Orians, Dr. Timothy Griffin, and Dr. Al Robbat. Our team’s expertise is interdisciplinary and includes researchers in the fields of ecology/biology (Orians), agronomy/food systems (Griffin), chemistry (Robbat), and economics (Cash/Nemec). We are also informally collaborating with researchers at the Tea Research Institute at the Chinese Ministry of Agricultural Science.

Sean and I are working on the economic portion of the project. We will be examining how a variety of weather variables – monsoon onset and duration, total monsoon precipitation, temperatures, solar radiation – have impacted yields across China. We are working with Dr. Bruce Anderson at Boston University to collect our key climate variables.

I’ve been working on creating a spatial database of the counties where tea production occurs across China’s major tea producing provinces. Sounds like an easy task, but it was actually a six-month project. I have been assembling anecdotal and quantitative data on the sites of production across China since last summer. It was very difficult to assemble this information because it was both sparse and scattered across a variety of Chinese sources. Once I gathered all the data, I then had to code each county in China (there are about 2,400 of them!) so that my software program could distinguish between tea-producing and non tea-producing provinces.

The final product is above. On the eve of this major storm, it feels good to have a huge chunk of this project behind me! I’m also glad I was able to apply my GIS skills to this project.

I will also be studying for my qualifying examination which I plan to take in May or June. The “Q exam” is the biggest hurdle that all doctoral students must surpass in order to begin their dissertation. My exam will cover nutrition science and policy, agriculture science and policy, and the economics of food and agriculture. There is a written component and then three hour oral examination with three faculty members.

As Liz Lemon would say…”blerg”.

Actually, I’m up for the challenge. It might be enjoyable to revisit all that old course material, master it all, and then impress my friends at parties! I am also trying to create fun ways to learn the material. One of which is to scour the internet for interesting articles on topic areas relevant to my exam and then write about those articles on my blog.

After some searching today (I actually had a hard time finding interesting material), I found a post on the Freakonomics blog about what economists call “commitment devices”. The author gives Congress some credit for giving itself a deadline that comes with consequences – a commitment device – to force itself to make decisions. I don’t agree that Congress deserves any amount of respect for the deal. But I do think that a commitment device, “a method to push your future self into some behavior”, is a promising concept with applications for nutrition and agriculture research. The Freakonomics author notes a few applications of this concept, one of which is on small-scale farmers in Kenya. Innovations for Poverty action using a commitment device to nudge farmers into purchasing fertilizer for their crops to boost yields and incomes. There are also applications to my own life.

I realized that I can devise my own commitment device to keep me motivated for the qualifying exam. I know what I’d like my behavior to be for this period of time, it just seems like a matter of finding a mix of the right incentives to make future Rebecca study diligently. I hope I find a good one. Gulp.

This also reminds me of a Seinfeld bit in which Jerry talks about “morning guy” and “night guy”, and how night guy is always ruining it for morning guy.

While most of us don’t have access to the fancy software used by Times authors, there is a lot that can be done even with Excel. As Silver notes by messing around with default settings you can create nice looking infographics in Excel. As I mentioned in my last post there are some free programs available for download, like Tableau Public or Google Gadgets, that can be used to create infographics that are a little more souped up than the standard graphs/charts you can make in Excel. Using a program like Tableau Public requires a small investment of time to learn how it works, but I think its well worth it.

In the coming weeks and months I hope to post some more data projects I’ve created using Tableau or Google Gadgets.

Check out the blog post where the graphs are displayed on Dr. Wilde’s U.S. Food Policy blog. By the way, the U.S. Food Policy blog is a great place to stay up to date on a variety of U.S. food policy matters.