New Soybean Industries

Hi Nathan - the good news is that either creating a new sector as part of the study area data or doing analysis by parts (ABP) is that you end up with exactly the same results. The easiest way is to do an ABP. That way you are not trying to change production functions and messing with the byproducts. To do either, you need to create a production budget for the two different activities. You would want to get as much detail as possible for the processing facility on what goods and services they would purchase locally. They key is local purchases for each of your 5 regions. The bad news is that MRIO when you are adding sectors is problematic since there is no information about trade flows for your new industries therefore no feedback effects. You will want to do your MRIO manually so you will need to estimate the interactions for the first round of the MRIO. That is, what will the growers and processor buy from the other regions. You can likely ask them. Most of the MRIO impact occurs in the first round so you won't be missing much.

Scott asked me to check on this thread. Because you are using MRIO, I think it would actually be easier to either modify the closest industry to your edimame processing or to completely take over an unused industry sector and convert it to your new industry. If converting: 1) Customize > Study Area and choose an industry that currently is empty (all zeroes). You will want to choose a sector that is blank in all your regions so you can export the customized production function to the library from the first model and import it to all the others. Enter all the values, you can steal relationships from the closest manufacturing sectors if you don't get data for edimame mfg. 2) Customize > Industry Production - this is the production function. This is the hardest step. Note, it the data is more aggregated than the IMPLAN 440 sectors, you can distribute based on the closest manufacturing sector for the commodities that comprise your aggregate number. 3) Customize > Commodity Production - choose the product that most closely corresponds to edimame (eg, fresh vegetable or frozen vegetable) and zero out the products that this industry used to produce. Note, you will need to customize in the above order. Going back to step 1 will undo changes to steps 2 and 3.

Scott & Doug, Thanks as always for the fast response and advice. Two sectors that would be easy for me to "take over" would be tobacco production and tobacco manufacturing since neither exist in our state. However, I do not know if the edamame folks (farmers or manf.) will have the detail yet to develop a full production function, particularly the manf. side. A couple of follow up questions... Scenario 1 - I take over the two tobacco sectors, one for production of veg. soybeans and one for processing veg. soybeans. I know that the farming of veg. soybeans is going to be similar to sector 3 - vegetable and melon farming and that the closest manf. sector is likely to be close to 53 - Frozen food manufacturing. 1) So I gather information on edamame production and processing and edit the Study Area data for the two empty tobacco sectors. Output, wages, proprietor income, TVA...I should be able to get these. I enter the data, re-construct the model 2) Based on my assumptions in the above, I export the prod. functions for sectors 3 and 53, then in Customize Industry Production, I import the respective veg. farming and frozen food manf. sectors into the previously empty tobacco (now edamame) sectors. Re-construct model Now I have edamame output, income, va entered via the Study Area data edit and I have reasonable prod. functions for both sectors via the Industry Production import of the veg. manf. sectors that "match" 3) I customize Commodity Prod and set Vegetables as my commodity for the new Edamame production sector (rather than tobacco) then I set Frozen Foods as the commodity for my new Edamame manf. sector (rather than cigarettes and cigars). Re-construct model. Now I have a base model with my tobacco sectors now reflecting the new Edamame industry. I can then export, import these prod. function for my different regions in the MRIO and things should function accordingly, correct? Of course where I can edit the prod. functions I will, maybe I find the manf. is planning to say freeze half of the product and package the other half as fresh product. I can edit the commodity production to reflect this. I think this give me a fairly easy way to do this analysis without all of the detailed production function information to really "create" the industry. Any thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

That works. I had to test exporting a production function to the library and importing it to a different sector number - it works in version 3, it did not work in version 2. Hopefully, one of the biggest inputs - oilseeds into soybean manufacturing will be data that they have.