Kentucky Agricultural Development Fund Evaluation

With funds from the tobacco master settlement, the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board (KADB) has invested in a broad array of projects and programs to stimulate new markets, add value to agricultural products, and otherwise create opportunities for Kentucky farms, farmers, and farm products for over 25 years. This project aimed to provide KADB with a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of those investments over the 2015 to 2022 time period. Work included intensive cleaning, standardizing, categorizing, and spatializing of grant programs and loan award datasets; summarizing categories over time by creating summary tables and maps; correlating investments with county-level, longitudinal agriculture production and economic activity; and providing recommendations to guide future loan and grant internal processes and investments (based, in part, on patterns in economic and agriculture activity and spatial disparities in recipient counties and farmers). After identifying a set of peer states based on similarity scores across both current and historic food cluster and agriculture profiles, a peer state analysis was also performed in order to situate Kentucky’s growth trends in context.

While Mass Economics led the quantitative analytics for the project, project team lead, KK&P, led the extensive qualitative research efforts to complement and contextualize the quantitative findings. Mass Economics collaborated with KK&P staff on the final report, available here: https://tinyurl.com/KADBeval