collapse

There was a post on the other site (~ 6 months back) where the headline was that a computer model predicted increasing crop YIELDS all the way out to year 2100. All the techno-utipians were rejoicing and talking about all the whiz bang agri-tech that is beating the doomsayers.

I did a bit of a deep dive and it was pretty interesting in the deep details. Basically all the big measurements are heading in a dismal direction. Like the number of acres, the size of the total crop, the costs, soil fertility, soil depth, aquifer depletion... We basically strip mined a lot of agricultural land and its all depleting in a non-renewable sense.

So farmers have indeed responded, kind of forking in two directions. One direction is to add more inputs (pesticides, irrigation, machinery etc) to bolster production. The other direction is to take lands right out of production...like shifting to dryland, shifting to grazing range or even totally abandoning everything.

So if you're grasping for a "line goes up" narrative, YIELD is convenient to the story.

What YIELD is, is production per area figure. So like, if you jettison all these marginal failing fields, your "average" climbs. Because you're making the denominator smaller FASTER than you're making the numerator smaller. But production is falling!

So an example would be that a state with failing rainfall needs to reduce all tbr cornfields that depend on rain. Maybe 30% of the fields shift to beans or some other crop. So now, you look at only these remaining plots of corn and they are getting jacked from well water, pesticides, fertilizer and such. The Yield number is healthy even though your cost per corn / total production per corn crop number just took a bloodbath.

Its super wild how distorted and perverse the impression was coming out of the release of that study. Its basically propaganda?!

All the mom-and-pop local ski areas gave out to the big corporate chains. The analogy holds that far.

Even more ironically, the big ski chains had access to cheap capital (they were trading on the stock exchange) and they converted their money into building re-sellable ski slope-side condos and vacation homes. Basically every ski area had undeveloped real estate which they built out.

If you looked at the security filings, the ski area business was running at break-even. After all the staff costs, snowmaking, operating costs etc the revenue they take in for the whole entire countru generated no profit whatsoever.

They basically "made money" on selling condos, and they literally built every condo they possibly had the potential to ever build and ran out of inventory. That was a one time cash-out move that cannot be repeated. If the ski areas start to fail it'll be a huge rug-pull on all these small time investors. There are already towns where the ski area closed and hotels and resorts just got shuttered and fell into obsolescence.

You can almost see the ruins of the future for farming in this story. Every farmhouse , rural community etc is on the chopping block once this shifts into high gear. Like every farm community is a bunch of small time investors who are holding the bag in the end. They all have mortgages, loans on equipment and have poured everything into physical assets that have little or no value in a different future that's coming at us fast.

Every one of these farmers can turn and look back generations and see proof farming is possible, and then you turn and face the future and its a different outlook. Every bad growing season is another shockwave.