Eastern Broccoli team-member Xiaoli Fan defended her PhD dissertation on July 24th. She is joining the faculty in Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta. Congratulations, Xiaoli!

As a graduate student in Applied Economics with Prof. Miguel Gómez at Cornell, she made big contributions to the project. First, studied seasonal effects on market efficiency of broccoli, finding that local production made the markets more efficient by reducing the likelihood of excess supply. Second, she

studied consumers’ willingness to pay for local broccoli in eastern markets finding that there is a price premium in markets where the “local” attribute is valued in general. Finally, she developed a model for finding the optimum location for cooling infrastructure that would serve multiple farms by optimizing the type of equipment to fit the scale of production, as well as the distance to farms and to markets.

Her work is the basis for current and forthcoming work with producers and food hubs. Some of that work will be done by our new team member, Carol Dong. Carol has been visiting growers and food hubs already to analyze systems and cost structures.