Just saying, I highly doubt the numbers in the post. But as a Spanish person I gotta say how fucked private agriculture is. How does it make sense that everyone is planting whatever they want and this turns into boom-bust cycles of the prices of certain crops? Happened with lemons (very profitable 5 years ago, everyone planted lemon trees, this year all lemon trees start producing, overproduction ensues, catastrophic price fall and millions of tons of lemons wasted). Is happening with pistachio. Fucking hell, how are people so blind to how inefficient this shit is!!!
I think op didn’t even consider that you need a bunch of labor and even if you’re running the cleanest organic potato farm, you need to add shit to the soil, or have a lot of it to practice crop rotation and no-till agriculture
That’s exactly the point. Pistachios are expensive now, so for the past 3 years, there’s been a pistachio fever where farmers have been planting so many of the trees. But trees take years until they yield pistachio, so for now the investment is made and the trees are just growing, but the pistachio production has barely grown. In a few years, the trees will start producing, the market will be saturated with pistachio, and the price at the farm of pistachios will drop dramatically as it always happens with every fucking boom-bust crop
100 m^2 = 0.01 ha, so the implied yield here is 100 t/ha, which is about 2-5x the typical yield. Let’s assume you can get $10,000 retail out of a single hectare (that assumes $2/kilo at a more reasonable yield). Farmers typically only see about 1/10th of that, so it’ll take 100x more land to produce the stated amount of revenue - about $1,000 per hectare rather than per 100 square meters. Find 100 hectares of land (probably doable with a minor 1-2 million dollar investment) and keep your inputs down and you’re on easy street!
To be completely fair, 100ha of agricultural land in the countryside in Spain will set you back much less than 1-2M€, but yeah, your calculations seem more believable
If you want to make money farming, you don’t grow potatoes. They are possibly the cheapest thing you can grow. Instead you grow salad greens, a cash crop.
My comment says “lemon prices were high so farmers planted lemons”, I’m agreeing with you. “Planting whatever you want” to me doesn’t mean absolute independence from market signals, it means having the ultimate decision over it instead of relying on some other entity making the decision for you (or making it collectively and democratically)
Just saying, I highly doubt the numbers in the post. But as a Spanish person I gotta say how fucked private agriculture is. How does it make sense that everyone is planting whatever they want and this turns into boom-bust cycles of the prices of certain crops? Happened with lemons (very profitable 5 years ago, everyone planted lemon trees, this year all lemon trees start producing, overproduction ensues, catastrophic price fall and millions of tons of lemons wasted). Is happening with pistachio. Fucking hell, how are people so blind to how inefficient this shit is!!!
You know what’s even funnier? This shit happens worldwide
Monocultures are the fucking worst. If you move to alternative agriculture models it’s difficult to make it extractive and speculative
Yeah, the margins gor farming have to be way smaller than this post makes it out yo be
I think op didn’t even consider that you need a bunch of labor and even if you’re running the cleanest organic potato farm, you need to add shit to the soil, or have a lot of it to practice crop rotation and no-till agriculture
This is bullshit. The pistachios don’t look any cheaper to me.
That’s exactly the point. Pistachios are expensive now, so for the past 3 years, there’s been a pistachio fever where farmers have been planting so many of the trees. But trees take years until they yield pistachio, so for now the investment is made and the trees are just growing, but the pistachio production has barely grown. In a few years, the trees will start producing, the market will be saturated with pistachio, and the price at the farm of pistachios will drop dramatically as it always happens with every fucking boom-bust crop
100 m^2 = 0.01 ha, so the implied yield here is 100 t/ha, which is about 2-5x the typical yield. Let’s assume you can get $10,000 retail out of a single hectare (that assumes $2/kilo at a more reasonable yield). Farmers typically only see about 1/10th of that, so it’ll take 100x more land to produce the stated amount of revenue - about $1,000 per hectare rather than per 100 square meters. Find 100 hectares of land (probably doable with a minor 1-2 million dollar investment) and keep your inputs down and you’re on easy street!
To be completely fair, 100ha of agricultural land in the countryside in Spain will set you back much less than 1-2M€, but yeah, your calculations seem more believable
If you want to make money farming, you don’t grow potatoes. They are possibly the cheapest thing you can grow. Instead you grow salad greens, a cash crop.
It’s the reverse. Prices dictate what farmers plant.
My comment says “lemon prices were high so farmers planted lemons”, I’m agreeing with you. “Planting whatever you want” to me doesn’t mean absolute independence from market signals, it means having the ultimate decision over it instead of relying on some other entity making the decision for you (or making it collectively and democratically)