The U.S. is largely self-sufficient in agricultural food production, supported by a well-developed storage and interstate trade system. However, extreme weather events put increasing pressure on agriculture, potentially impacting the country’s ability to provide food for its growing population and underscoring the importance of maintaining a resilient food supply chain. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looks at U.S. interstate trade for agricultural products, analyzing how weather events in one area can have wide-ranging effects on food production.

MIT researchers developed a method that generates more accurate uncertainty measures for certain types of estimation. This could help improve the reliability of data analyses in areas like economics, epidemiology, and environmental sciences.