Economists writing about agriculture should be required to pass Agronomy 101 and also basic common sense. Because in just one paper we have the following issues:
Hey Canadians could you just plant 200,000 hectares more corn (maize) next year? That seems like something that would definitely be possible and isn’t constrained by, oh, labor shortages or machinery or the amount of time it takes to buy land or fuck, how much of Canada that could sensibly grow corn is just sitting there idle? Is it more than 2000 km2?
Also: “coarse grains” is a category that (in this case at least) includes maize. In the US, maize absolutely dominates the category. Therefore, the fact that the aggregate price for coarse grains is similar to that of maize is just…….. HOW ALGEBRA WORKS? AND ALSO REALITY? and says nothing about the substitutability between maize and sorghum or barley or whatever!
AND, if prices spike for a year for bad weather, farmers aren’t going to assume that high price will continue forever and so rush out to plant TWO THOUSAND SQUARE KILOMETERS more corn?!
Excuse me while I unhinge my jaw and swallow the entire American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
According to a government report, “Sweet corn is grown in all provinces on close to 20,000 hectares of land, making it the
most extensively planted vegetable in Canada.“So this asshole wants us to increase our production BY AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, because of a fucking MARKET BUBBLE?
(If they consider field corn an acceptable substitute, we have 1.6mil hectares of corn total being grown. That’s still an eighth of the current production.)
The people making the marketing decisions have no understanding of what they are purchasing. This is true in nearly every IT department world-wide. Likely isn’t much different in any department where the managers don’t do the work.
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