Purdue University and Microsoft team up to calculate COVID-19 impact on agriculture

The Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, in collaboration with Microsoft, has created an online dashboard, built on top of Microsoft Azure and Power BI platforms, to quantify the potential risk to the supply of agricultural products as a result of farm and agricultural worker illnesses from COVID19. Vulnerability of the supply of an agricultural commodity to risks such as COVID-19 depend on the number of farmers and agricultural workers affected, the location of affected workers, the crops and animals that are grown in the most impacted regions, and the degree to which production is concentrated in a particular geographic region. By combining data on the number of COVID cases in each U.S. county with the county’s total population, U.S. Department of Agriculture data on the number of farmers and hired farm workers in each county, and data on agricultural production of each county, and estimate of the share of agricultural production at risk can be computed. Read more