Global Agricultural Land Use v. Agricultural Production [OC]Submitted by rosetechnology t3_xvgmuw in dataisbeautiful
OdinGuru t1_ir159by wrote
Not having both vertical scales include 0 seems very misleading here. Land use in particular land scale of 4.4 to 5 means that it’s largely constant with only ~10% deviation.
Potato_Octopi t1_ir1b9z3 wrote
What's misleading about it? I don't think anyone would assume land use was zero a couple decades ago.
OdinGuru t1_ir1dmv2 wrote
“Visually” (ie without paying attention to the scale numbers) the plot above make it “look” like land use and production both rose together in proportion from 1961 to 1999 then while production continued its rise that land use dropped.
However if we fixed the Y-axis to include zero. We’d visually see a very different “story”. Land usage would start high and say high with only some small “minor” variation across the plot and we’d still see production in $ trending up (as 1->5 is most of 0->5). In this plot it wouldn’t look like something massively different occurred before/after 1999. Instead it would be immediately apparent that the rise in $ over time probably has nothing to do with land use and is primarily driven by something else.
This is what some other comments here have pointed out, and that it may be “value” in $ increasing over time rather than actually producing more physical things per hectare.
Mendicant__ t1_ir3ewve wrote
The world has added 4 billion additional people over the time period of this chart, and in that same time the amount of hunger-affected people has gone down. There is no way that is possible unless we are actually producing more physical things on that land.
OdinGuru t1_ir3i9fu wrote
I don’t think anyone disagrees that yields have gone up due to increased efficiency. The point is that trying to measure that using $ value is flawed because yield increases can’t be separated from unit price changes. I do think it’s very unlikely that actual yields have increase by ~5x over 57 years, I doubt farming is THAT much better. From inflation alone we know that price for the same basket of goods has DEFINITELY gone up in that time. This data makes it impossible to know how much of one vs the other, you would need other data sets.
Mendicant__ t1_ir54lmf wrote
People here are definitely claiming exactly that--that yields aren't really higher, we're just charging more for food.
Leaving that aside, crop yields, by weight, have doubled or tripled for a bunch of food staples in the time frame of this chart, and this chart also shows land used for agriculture going up for most of the run.
Potato_Octopi t1_ir1jlh8 wrote
Visually the truncated Y axis allows the changes to be highlighted, which is the point of the chart. It doesn't change the "story" it just allows you to focus to focus on the changes.
And yields have been increasing per hectare, so that's a non complaint.
TheAtomicClock t1_ir1gd6w wrote
Yeah seriously. A visualization isn’t bad just because it requires rubbing a couple brain cells.
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