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Operating at the extreme: estimating the upper yield boundary of winter wheat production in commercial practice

Mitchell, Emily G; Crout, N.; Wilson, Paul; Wood, Andrew; Stupfler, Giles

Description

Wheat farming provides 28.5% of global cereal production. After steady growth in average crop yield from 1950 to 1990, wheat yields have generally stagnated, which prompts the question of whether further improvements are possible. Statistical studies of agronomic parameters such as crop yield have so far exclusively focused on estimating parameters describing the whole of the data, rather than the highest yields specifically. These indicators include the mean or median yield of a crop, or...[Show more]

dc.contributor.authorMitchell, Emily G
dc.contributor.authorCrout, N.
dc.contributor.authorWilson, Paul
dc.contributor.authorWood, Andrew
dc.contributor.authorStupfler, Giles
dc.date.accessioned2021-01-18T23:55:14Z
dc.date.available2021-01-18T23:55:14Z
dc.identifier.issn2054-5703
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1885/219718
dc.description.abstractWheat farming provides 28.5% of global cereal production. After steady growth in average crop yield from 1950 to 1990, wheat yields have generally stagnated, which prompts the question of whether further improvements are possible. Statistical studies of agronomic parameters such as crop yield have so far exclusively focused on estimating parameters describing the whole of the data, rather than the highest yields specifically. These indicators include the mean or median yield of a crop, or finding the combinations of agronomic traits that are correlated with increasing average yields. In this paper, we take an alternative approach and consider high yields only. We carry out an extreme value analysis of winter wheat yield data collected in England and Wales between 2006 and 2015. This analysis suggests that, under current climate and growing conditions, there is indeed a finite upper bound for winter wheat yield, whose value we estimate to be 17.60 tonnes per hectare. We then refine the analysis for strata defined by either location or level of use of agricultural inputs. We find that there is no statistical evidence for variation of maximal yield depending on location, and neither is there statistical evidence that maximum yield levels are improved by high levels of crop protection and fertilizer use.
dc.description.sponsorshipE.G.M.’s work has been funded under the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship grant scheme as part of the Modelling and Analytics for a Sustainable Society PhD programme at the University of Nottingham.
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.language.isoen_AU
dc.publisherThe Royal Society Publishing
dc.rights© 2020 The Authors.
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.sourceRoyal Society Open Science
dc.subjectExtreme value analysis
dc.subjectgeneralized Pareto distribution
dc.subjectmaximum yield levels
dc.subjectwinter wheat yield
dc.titleOperating at the extreme: estimating the upper yield boundary of winter wheat production in commercial practice
dc.typeJournal article
local.description.notesImported from ARIES
local.identifier.citationvolume7
dc.date.issued2020
local.identifier.absfor010401 - Applied Statistics
local.identifier.ariespublicationu1027566xPUB142
local.publisher.urlhttp://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/
local.type.statusPublished Version
local.contributor.affiliationMitchell, Emily G, University of Nottingham
local.contributor.affiliationCrout, N., University of Nottingham
local.contributor.affiliationWilson, Paul, School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham
local.contributor.affiliationWood, Andrew, College of Business and Economics, ANU
local.contributor.affiliationStupfler, Giles, School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham
local.bibliographicCitation.issue4
local.bibliographicCitation.startpage1
local.bibliographicCitation.lastpage12
local.identifier.doi10.1098/rsos.191919
dc.date.updated2020-11-02T04:19:28Z
dcterms.accessRightsOpen Access
dc.provenance© 2020 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
dc.rights.licenseCreative Commons Attribution License
CollectionsANU Research Publications

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