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Modeling of crop supply frequently adopts separate treatment of area and yield variables. The advantage of this approach is that it conveniently imposes the property of land being a quasi-fixed factor, at least on the aggregate. Given an agricultural land frontier, total supply of land may be fixed in the short run. Various crop multi-market models either ignore this property, thus foregoing the advantage of the area x yield formulation, or impose the aggregate land constraint in an ad hoc fashion.
This note proposes a parsimonious area x yield framework of agricultural supply that is firmly rooted in optimization and requires minimal priors for
calibration. The framework is designed for direct application in multi-commodity modeling of agricultural supply and demand.
