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hatthew 12 hours ago

Similarly

> Crop yields increase 3-5×

> Farmers go from $600/acre to $14,000/acre revenue

Wouldn't that revenue jump require a 23x increase in crop yield?

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abdullahkhalids 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Let's be very charitable and figure out a scenario where this could be true.

Suppose, a farmer has a farm which produces 1 unit of crop. Farmer uses 0.8 of the crop for subsistence and sells 0.2 of the crop. They get $600/acre.

Now, crop yields go up 5x, so now the farm produces 5 units of crop. Subsistence needs are the same, so the farmer is now able to sell 4.2 units of crop. This is 4.2/0.2 = 21 times more revenue or $12,600/acre.

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hatthew 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Hmm yeah I didn't consider that they might use part of their yields in ways that don't generate revenue. However that would mean they use $2,400/acre/month of their crops for subsistence which doesn't seem very plausible, so I agree that's a very charitable interpretation. Would only make sense if their field is only a few square meters, in which case the framing of "revenue per acre" is extremely misleading.

Edit: looks like those numbers might be per year (it doesn't seem to specify explicitly), so it actually might be vaguely plausible (though misleading) if we make several charitable assumptions.

	▲	throwaway201606 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They stop growing a full amount of low value subsistence crops needed to survive and start growing cash crops on some portion or on all of the land. Those cash crops have a higher value. An example - say you have 4 acres of land and have a family of 4. In the old world, say you needed one acre per person to grow enough food to the next crop harvest. This would be something like corn or potatoes that can keep. So all your land goes to growing food to survive and you cant make any money. In the new world, with irrigation, you can do much more - say for the sake of argument, 4 times the crop, in the same space. Now, you only need 1/4 of an acre per person or an acre for everyone. So you grow vegetables that sell for 10 times as much on the 3/4s of land you have that you no longer need to use to survive. Or even better, you grow high veg on the entire piece of land for income and use the cash to buy your corn and potatoes or whatever as you need them. Just as all other commercial farmers do across the world. In other words, solar allows them to become small business owners.
	▲	Jtsummers 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> $2,400/acre/month You've added the per month part. The article itself doesn't provide a time period but the two reasonable ones are month and year. For a year, that could actually be a reasonable amount of crops kept by a family for their own consumption and storage for later consumption. If it's monthly, that is pretty high.