Could a quality control method help governments and relief agencies better predict famines or food shortages? Two Missouri S&T researchers believe it's possible. Photo via Our World Foundation.

Missouri S&T graduate student Parthiv Shah and his advisor -- Elizabeth Cudney, assistant professor of engineering management and systems engineering -- have borrowed a statistical method used by manufacturers to improve product quality to try to determine agricultural yields. Their approach, using a method developed by Genichi Taguchi, a pioneer in the quality improvement field, has proven amazingly accurate at predicting agricultural output. The two researchers believe the method could be used by global relief agencies and governments to help predict food shortages or famines.

Employing a method called the Mahalanobis-Taguchi System, Shah and Cudney evaluated two years’ worth of agricultural yields from a dozen industrialized nations to predict the output for a third year. The results of their research were accurate to within 95 percent of the actual yields for the third year.

Working with 2001 and 2002 data on the yield of 12 types of agricultural products – including grains, wheat, meat and dairy products, and fruits and vegetables – the researchers then compared their results with the actual 2003 yields for those 12 nations. “Using just two years of data, we are able to get fairly accurate predictions with this method,” says Cudney in a Missouri S&T news release.

Food shortages have been the subject of recent discussions of global planners, as conferences in Rome and Paris in early June called for more research on long-term agricultural sustainability. The meetings followed a May 29, 2008, report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, based in Paris, that suggested policymakers reconsider biotech or genetically modified crops to improve crop yields.