"Dirty Little Secret"
"The dirty little secret about production agriculture is that regardless of the crop size, the total amount paid for the annual production of a storable commodity at the first point of sale is relatively constant in terms of dollars, especially when averaged over many years, while the more variable of the two factors of the "the production times price equation" is the quantity, which also
evens out over the years in a steady upward trend. Otherwise, more people would go hungry each year and population growth would eventually reverse as more and more people consumed breeding animals or starved to death.

Go a layer deeper into the mist and you will find that all production gets consumed, either by humans or animals, so where is the surplus?  The answer is obvious. We never have a surplus. The surplus is only the mist we see that clouds the reality of world population growth.

The final constant here, is that all storable commodities always get consumed, the variable is always who, (or what creature) consumes, and where consumption takes place. Everything else said about ag economics, farm size, the future of family farming, farm prices, and so-called farm surpluses, fit into the above facts.

I seldom write or talk about this, because these real facts, if correctly charted, will leave most agriculture producers in a hopeless situation, as they are pushed closer and closer to the buffalo
jump every year by our democracies' fatal flaw."

Fred Lundgren
 

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