Amazing article. Thanks for sharing

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.

“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.

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.