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 Federal statistical agency's mandate to protect confidential data. Outside of that role I build AI-centered tools for water, climate, and agricultural economics.
Selected publications
- Yourek, M., Daniel Haller, Nicholas A. Potter, Kirti Rajagopalan, Kairon Shayne D. Garcia, and Jon Yoder. 2026. Water right forfeiture in Washington state from 1967 to 2019, 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.
Selected Projects
- rnassqs — R package to fetch data using the USDA NASS Quick Stats API; on CRAN since 2019.
- herdr — fork of the terminal agent multiplexer with render-path performance patches.
- orchestra — self-built dispatcher using sandboxed agents to work on queued issues.
- openbrain — personal AI memory and knowledge base drawn from OB1.
- agentic-researcher — automated economics-research pipeline to conduct literature searches and other tasks.
See my GitHub for more.