I was doing some research on the reduction in the number of farms in the United States, and came up with this graph which shows the number of farms each year versus the S&P 500. There is an inverse relationship of course, but one of the things that really caught my eye was how dramatic, from a visual standpoint, the dot com crash was.
Farms have been getting bigger on average. Perhaps a better graph would compare the S&P 500 to acres under cultivation, or better still, unsubsidized acres under cultivation. (I can dream, because I don't think the last statistic exists... but how much land would come out of production if we dropped all subsidies? 20%?)
ReplyDeleteDavid Merkel
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