Nicholas Potter

GitHub Google Scholar ORCID LinkedIn CV

I'm a Research Economist at the USDA Economic Research Service working on water, climate, and agriculture issues. At ERS I'm also the liaison for ERS's Databricks integration and serve on the GitHub Steering Committee, helping the agency build reproducible research workflows that still meet a statistical agency's duty to protect confidential data. Outside of that role I build AI-centered tools for water, climate, and agricultural economics.

Selected publications

  • Yourek, M., Haller, D., Potter, N.A., Rajagopalan, K., Garcia, K.S.D., & Yoder, J. (2026). Water right forfeiture in Washington state from 1967 to
    1. Water Policy. doi:10.2166/wp.2026.096
  • Potter, N.A., Hrozencik, R.A., & Wallander, S. (2025). Irrigation Organizations: Organization Types and Governance. USDA Economic Research Service, EB-45. ers.usda.gov
  • Cameron-Harp, M.V., Hendricks, N.P., & Potter, N.A. (2024). Predicting the spatial variation in cost-efficiency for agricultural greenhouse gas mitigation programs in the U.S. Carbon Balance and Management. doi:10.1186/s13021-024-00252-6
  • Hrozencik, R.A., Potter, N.A., & Wallander, S. (2023). The Cost-Effectiveness of Irrigation Canal Lining and Piping in the Western United States. In American Agriculture, Water Resources, and Climate Change (University of Chicago Press). doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226830629.003.0004
  • Potter, N.A., Hrozencik, R.A., & Wallander, S. (2023). Irrigation Organizations: Water Inflows and Outflows. USDA Economic Research Service, EB-36. ers.usda.gov
  • Potter, N.A. (2019). rnassqs: An R package to access agricultural data via the USDA-NASS Quick Stats API. Journal of Open Source Software. doi:10.21105/joss.01880

Full list on ORCID and Google Scholar.

Projects

  • rnassqs — R package for the USDA NASS Quick Stats API; on CRAN since 2019.
  • herdr — my fork of the terminal agent multiplexer, with render-path performance patches.
  • orchestra — runs development work across many repositories unattended: sandboxed AI worker and verifier runs with human approval gates.
  • openbrain — personal AI memory and knowledge base: one Postgres database, one MCP server, any AI plugs in.
  • agentic-researcher — automated economics-research pipeline over openbrain: paper harvest, relation, and literature review.