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No. Crop yields are up (30-90%) for every single type of crop in the United States in the past 30 years. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops

No. Crop yields are up (30-90%) for every single type of crop in the United States in the past 30 years. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyl... https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyl... https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld....

oddeyed 6y ago
The article seems pretty clear that the story is about how productivity is worse _than it would have been_ without the global heating that industrialisation has incurred.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  So this article's clickbait headline should read instead "While crop yields are up, they could be even higher..."? Let's set aside the dishonest scaremongering headline. No one can disprove a study that describes a fictional alternate reality based entirely on supposition of simulated outcomes. Productivity is higher than it has ever been in human history and the trend line is up and to the right and the Guardian wants you to be terrified.
  - cochne 6y ago
    I think the headline is fair. Would you have the same reaction to an article claiming smoking cigarettes hurts life expectancy? I don't think the argument that "life expectancy is up 30% since cigarettes were invented!" would be a good rebuttal against the headline.
    - deathgripsfan 6y ago
      This is a false comparison because you can run longitudinal studies with smoking populations and compare them to control populations. Let me know when we can run experiments on climate change with multiple Earths and compare them to control Earths.
      - frenchy 6y ago
        That's true, but we do have populations that are closer to control. There's still quite a few people who engage in subsistence farming in less industrialized nations. For example, the rice farmers in the northern Philippines (excluding Banaue which is heavily touristed). They've certainly benefited in the last century from medicine, a stable government that prevents their historical tribal warfare, and cheaper manufactured goods, but their actual farming hasn't changed a whole lot.
      - jellicle 6y ago
        Of course we can? And do? It's trivial to run a greenhouse at different temperatures and see how the plants grow. Trivial to adjust light, rainfall, mineral balance, pH, etc. Kids do this in 8th grade science fairs. Honestly HN. Here's an idea: when you encounter some topic area you don't know anything about, just consider for at least two seconds the possibility that there may be smart people working in that field, since before you were born. THEN start talking about it. Or don't. Maybe you don't have anything useful to add.
        lanstin 6y ago
        Isn’t biology as simple as Unix? Just read the man pages and the source for the binaries for a a few weeks and I can grok it. How could plants be more complicated than software? I can make stuff happen in software. Plants just sit there.
    - rufus_foreman 6y ago
      When I read the headline I thought it was claiming that farm productivity was falling. It's a misleading headline: I was misled by it. But people don't click on headlines telling you that things are the best they have ever been and getting even better, but are not quite as good as they could be. You've got to feed the doomscrollers.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  However, I am sure a large part of the increase in productivity is due to fossil fuels. For example a tractor versus a horse is much better in farming, and electric tractors are much more expensive than diesel powered tractors. Thus even their hypothetical would be better scenario doesn’t make much sense.
- SilasX 6y ago
  So then, the costs of fossil fuel emissions -- evaluated purely in terms of these results -- are less than their benefit? (That is, fossil fuel usage increased agricultural productivity, while warming decreased it by a smaller amount.) Obviously, you wouldn't want to dismiss the concerns of GW on that basis, but this doesn't seem like a good reason to think GW is a problem, even as there are other good reasons.
adreamingsoul 6y ago
Why is crop yield an indicator of productivity? Does any research exist that correlates yield with productivity?
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Crop yield is how much food you harvest per unit of land. It's the definition of productivity for farming. The amount of arable soil is the chief constraint on production.
  - realreality 6y ago
    > The research measured productivity by inputs – such as labor, fertilizer and equipment – and the output in food they produce When you highlight "yield", you're only counting the outputs, not all of the inputs that this study apparently models.
- gumby 6y ago
  Productivity is output divided by input. So in farming it can be yield divided by labor (labor productivity), yield divided by soil addenda (e.g. fertilizer), yield in dollars divided by all costs of production, etc. Sometimes factor productivity will have a specific name. For example capital efficiency is the productivity of capital (output divided by cap ex) which, due to the very nature of capex, is usually used to find a change due to investment. The productivity of energy use, typically measured on a whole economy basis, is called “energy intensity” (gdp/GW) though some industries are called “energy intensive”
  - adreamingsoul 6y ago
    Fascinating, thanks.
antattack 6y ago
On one hand, rising carbon levels in the atmosphere make plants grow faster, on the other, changing weather patterns, drought, frost, cause crop damage.
- nix23 6y ago
  >On one hand, rising carbon levels in the atmosphere make plants grow faster Just some plants grow faster. https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-higher-carbon-dioxide-levels-arent-good-news-even-if-some-plants-grow-faster-137235 https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-higher-car...
- atoav 6y ago
  I can't recall but I read a study once which had a look at how nutritients are affected by CO2 induced faster growth. The conclusion was pretty much that stuff grows faster but has less nutritients. (The study looked at rice I think)
  - OrbitRock 6y ago
    There’s also a phenomenon that hotter conditions cause water to evaporate faster. The term here is vapor pressure deficit (VPD). VPD is the relationship between the amount of water in the atmosphere, temperature, and the rate of evaporation. As temperature increases, rate of evaporation increases not linearly but exponentially. VPD has been established as a major control on plant growth. And there’s research showing that increasing VPD has already offset the gains we’ve seen from CO2 fertilization on plant growth: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396
- ben_w 6y ago
  Also on the minus side: human cognition is impaired by higher CO2 levels. https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/continued-CO2-emissions-will-impair-cognition-Penn-Boulder-study https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/continued-CO2-emissions-wil...
tryonenow 6y ago
When you're looking at something complex on the scale of the earth, it's easy to cherry pick data, even accidentally (we call that bias), to paint whatever picture you want. Right now there's immense institutional pressure against any research that is critical of climate change, so it's hard for me to trust anything in that field. There are indications that increased CO2 concentration is a huge boon to crop growth.
- minikites 6y ago
  >there's immense institutional pressure against any research that is critical of climate change There's also immense institutional pressure against "research" showing the Earth is the center of the solar system or "research" that evolution isn't real. It's not a conspiracy if the pressure is fighting falsehoods.
- nix23 6y ago
  Well it's kind of easy, if the downsides overweight the upsides your on a slippery slope earth-wise: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d...
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  Unless rising vapor pressure deficit undoes your gains from CO2 fertilization: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396
carlisle_ 6y ago
From the study: >We develop a robust econometric model of weather effects on global agricultural I don't think the US counts as global agriculture. Certainly a subset though.
dv_dt 6y ago
Drought alone cost $10-14B in 2019 and are increasing due to climate change. https://www.resources.org/archives/economic-impacts-drought-us-agriculture/ https://www.resources.org/archives/economic-impacts-drought-... Similar with flooding, and increasing pestilence due to warmer winters. As the saying goes, past events is no guarantee of future performance.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Only $10-14 billion? According to this list, worldwide agricultural output is $2-8 trillion (nominal vs. PPP) so I’d have expected way more drought induced losses even as just seasonal noise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_sector_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_secto...
  - dv_dt 6y ago
    I was unclear on the scope of those numbers, they were for US ag, so your number is comparing US drought numbers to the entire world output. Comparing an apple to the entire apple orchard. If we wait to take steps until it’s an even larger problem then we lock in decades of yield being curtailed by weather extremes. In your linked data, 2017 US Ag contribution to GDP is $175B, so almost 10% reduction of the entire nations agricultural output from just drought is significant, and expected to rise.
titzer 6y ago
Tomatoes taste like shit in America, hands down.
- deathgripsfan 6y ago
  Absolutely. Garden tomatoes taste amazing and can be eaten on their own with just a bit of salt.
  - bdefore 6y ago
    Right? They're night and day different in France. What exactly causes this? General store American ones often may as well be thin red latex bags of water.
    - redisman 6y ago
      Your generic supermarket tomato these days is optimized for long shelf life and not flavor or nutrition.
    - titzer 6y ago
      They are picked before they are ripe and they are artificially ripened, like bananas. They are cultivated for fast growth and maximum size, and not given time to mature. If you grow your own tomatoes, the results can be amazing. 30 years ago, my grandmother grew the most amazing tomatoes in her vegetable garden on the farm. When she died my uncles sold off the farm and a developer split it into 5 or 6 plots that are now mostly horse pastures with huge McMansions on them. So it goes.
    - MarkLowenstein 6y ago
      A lot of us don't like the taste of raw tomatoes. As far as I'm concerned, the closer they are to latex bags of water, the better. I only use them (generally sliced on sandwiches) to bolster my "eating vegetables" status to satisfy social pressures. I'm satisfied, whether I'm getting actual vitamins or not. I'm American. Possibly there are a lot of people like me here, so the stores are actually providing what the people want.
- 6y ago
chiefalchemist 6y ago
It's worth mentioning that (in the USA) cheap (read: subsidised) corn led to cheap sweeteners (i.e., high fructose corn syrup). That made more foods sweeter and sweet ones cheaper. Increase of such consumption contributes to the obesity rate. The point is, inexpensive raw food "materials" can have a downside. Maybe less corn isn't as bad as it sounds?
- reedjosh 6y ago
  I wish corn/wheat weren't subsidized. Half of a typical supermarket is filled with artificially cheap grain based product. The `stick to the perimeter` mantra about how to buy healthy food is directly related to the fact that grain based products tend toward the middle of most stores.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    Unfortunately, that advice no longer helps you avoid artificially cheap grain based products. The meat counter, nearly always on the perimeter, is full of grain-fed meat. And the frozen aisle, former composed largely of frozen versions of the produce section, is now dominated by prepared foods that are fairly calorie-dense and nutrient-poor -- and made from those same grain-based products. There are good choices to make in both those sections. (Or at least, better choices.) And better than the shelf-stable products that are even more calorie-dense (because water makes things spoil) in the middle aisles. But it's become a lot more complicated than it used to be.
_rpd 6y ago
From the article ... > ACC has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since 1961, a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 7 years of productivity growth. The effect is substantially more severe (a reduction of ~26–34%) in warmer regions such as Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01000-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01000-1

oddeyed 6y ago

The article seems pretty clear that the story is about how productivity is worse _than it would have been_ without the global heating that industrialisation has incurred.

chrisco255 6y ago
So this article's clickbait headline should read instead "While crop yields are up, they could be even higher..."? Let's set aside the dishonest scaremongering headline. No one can disprove a study that describes a fictional alternate reality based entirely on supposition of simulated outcomes. Productivity is higher than it has ever been in human history and the trend line is up and to the right and the Guardian wants you to be terrified.
- cochne 6y ago
  I think the headline is fair. Would you have the same reaction to an article claiming smoking cigarettes hurts life expectancy? I don't think the argument that "life expectancy is up 30% since cigarettes were invented!" would be a good rebuttal against the headline.
  - deathgripsfan 6y ago
    This is a false comparison because you can run longitudinal studies with smoking populations and compare them to control populations. Let me know when we can run experiments on climate change with multiple Earths and compare them to control Earths.
    - frenchy 6y ago
      That's true, but we do have populations that are closer to control. There's still quite a few people who engage in subsistence farming in less industrialized nations. For example, the rice farmers in the northern Philippines (excluding Banaue which is heavily touristed). They've certainly benefited in the last century from medicine, a stable government that prevents their historical tribal warfare, and cheaper manufactured goods, but their actual farming hasn't changed a whole lot.
    - jellicle 6y ago
      Of course we can? And do? It's trivial to run a greenhouse at different temperatures and see how the plants grow. Trivial to adjust light, rainfall, mineral balance, pH, etc. Kids do this in 8th grade science fairs. Honestly HN. Here's an idea: when you encounter some topic area you don't know anything about, just consider for at least two seconds the possibility that there may be smart people working in that field, since before you were born. THEN start talking about it. Or don't. Maybe you don't have anything useful to add.
      - lanstin 6y ago
        Isn’t biology as simple as Unix? Just read the man pages and the source for the binaries for a a few weeks and I can grok it. How could plants be more complicated than software? I can make stuff happen in software. Plants just sit there.
  - rufus_foreman 6y ago
    When I read the headline I thought it was claiming that farm productivity was falling. It's a misleading headline: I was misled by it. But people don't click on headlines telling you that things are the best they have ever been and getting even better, but are not quite as good as they could be. You've got to feed the doomscrollers.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
However, I am sure a large part of the increase in productivity is due to fossil fuels. For example a tractor versus a horse is much better in farming, and electric tractors are much more expensive than diesel powered tractors. Thus even their hypothetical would be better scenario doesn’t make much sense.
SilasX 6y ago
So then, the costs of fossil fuel emissions -- evaluated purely in terms of these results -- are less than their benefit? (That is, fossil fuel usage increased agricultural productivity, while warming decreased it by a smaller amount.) Obviously, you wouldn't want to dismiss the concerns of GW on that basis, but this doesn't seem like a good reason to think GW is a problem, even as there are other good reasons.

adreamingsoul 6y ago

Why is crop yield an indicator of productivity? Does any research exist that correlates yield with productivity?

chrisco255 6y ago
Crop yield is how much food you harvest per unit of land. It's the definition of productivity for farming. The amount of arable soil is the chief constraint on production.
- realreality 6y ago
  > The research measured productivity by inputs – such as labor, fertilizer and equipment – and the output in food they produce When you highlight "yield", you're only counting the outputs, not all of the inputs that this study apparently models.
gumby 6y ago
Productivity is output divided by input. So in farming it can be yield divided by labor (labor productivity), yield divided by soil addenda (e.g. fertilizer), yield in dollars divided by all costs of production, etc. Sometimes factor productivity will have a specific name. For example capital efficiency is the productivity of capital (output divided by cap ex) which, due to the very nature of capex, is usually used to find a change due to investment. The productivity of energy use, typically measured on a whole economy basis, is called “energy intensity” (gdp/GW) though some industries are called “energy intensive”
- adreamingsoul 6y ago
  Fascinating, thanks.

antattack 6y ago

On one hand, rising carbon levels in the atmosphere make plants grow faster, on the other, changing weather patterns, drought, frost, cause crop damage.

nix23 6y ago
>On one hand, rising carbon levels in the atmosphere make plants grow faster Just some plants grow faster. https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-higher-carbon-dioxide-levels-arent-good-news-even-if-some-plants-grow-faster-137235 https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-higher-car...
atoav 6y ago
I can't recall but I read a study once which had a look at how nutritients are affected by CO2 induced faster growth. The conclusion was pretty much that stuff grows faster but has less nutritients. (The study looked at rice I think)
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  There’s also a phenomenon that hotter conditions cause water to evaporate faster. The term here is vapor pressure deficit (VPD). VPD is the relationship between the amount of water in the atmosphere, temperature, and the rate of evaporation. As temperature increases, rate of evaporation increases not linearly but exponentially. VPD has been established as a major control on plant growth. And there’s research showing that increasing VPD has already offset the gains we’ve seen from CO2 fertilization on plant growth: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396
ben_w 6y ago
Also on the minus side: human cognition is impaired by higher CO2 levels. https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/continued-CO2-emissions-will-impair-cognition-Penn-Boulder-study https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/continued-CO2-emissions-wil...

tryonenow 6y ago

When you're looking at something complex on the scale of the earth, it's easy to cherry pick data, even accidentally (we call that bias), to paint whatever picture you want. Right now there's immense institutional pressure against any research that is critical of climate change, so it's hard for me to trust anything in that field. There are indications that increased CO2 concentration is a huge boon to crop growth.

minikites 6y ago
>there's immense institutional pressure against any research that is critical of climate change There's also immense institutional pressure against "research" showing the Earth is the center of the solar system or "research" that evolution isn't real. It's not a conspiracy if the pressure is fighting falsehoods.
nix23 6y ago
Well it's kind of easy, if the downsides overweight the upsides your on a slippery slope earth-wise: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d...
OrbitRock 6y ago
Unless rising vapor pressure deficit undoes your gains from CO2 fertilization: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396

carlisle_ 6y ago

From the study: >We develop a robust econometric model of weather effects on global agricultural I don't think the US counts as global agriculture. Certainly a subset though.

dv_dt 6y ago

Drought alone cost $10-14B in 2019 and are increasing due to climate change. https://www.resources.org/archives/economic-impacts-drought-us-agriculture/ https://www.resources.org/archives/economic-impacts-drought-... Similar with flooding, and increasing pestilence due to warmer winters. As the saying goes, past events is no guarantee of future performance.

ben_w 6y ago
Only $10-14 billion? According to this list, worldwide agricultural output is $2-8 trillion (nominal vs. PPP) so I’d have expected way more drought induced losses even as just seasonal noise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_sector_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_secto...
- dv_dt 6y ago
  I was unclear on the scope of those numbers, they were for US ag, so your number is comparing US drought numbers to the entire world output. Comparing an apple to the entire apple orchard. If we wait to take steps until it’s an even larger problem then we lock in decades of yield being curtailed by weather extremes. In your linked data, 2017 US Ag contribution to GDP is $175B, so almost 10% reduction of the entire nations agricultural output from just drought is significant, and expected to rise.

titzer 6y ago

Tomatoes taste like shit in America, hands down.

deathgripsfan 6y ago
Absolutely. Garden tomatoes taste amazing and can be eaten on their own with just a bit of salt.
- bdefore 6y ago
  Right? They're night and day different in France. What exactly causes this? General store American ones often may as well be thin red latex bags of water.
  - redisman 6y ago
    Your generic supermarket tomato these days is optimized for long shelf life and not flavor or nutrition.
  - titzer 6y ago
    They are picked before they are ripe and they are artificially ripened, like bananas. They are cultivated for fast growth and maximum size, and not given time to mature. If you grow your own tomatoes, the results can be amazing. 30 years ago, my grandmother grew the most amazing tomatoes in her vegetable garden on the farm. When she died my uncles sold off the farm and a developer split it into 5 or 6 plots that are now mostly horse pastures with huge McMansions on them. So it goes.
  - MarkLowenstein 6y ago
    A lot of us don't like the taste of raw tomatoes. As far as I'm concerned, the closer they are to latex bags of water, the better. I only use them (generally sliced on sandwiches) to bolster my "eating vegetables" status to satisfy social pressures. I'm satisfied, whether I'm getting actual vitamins or not. I'm American. Possibly there are a lot of people like me here, so the stores are actually providing what the people want.
6y ago

chiefalchemist 6y ago

It's worth mentioning that (in the USA) cheap (read: subsidised) corn led to cheap sweeteners (i.e., high fructose corn syrup). That made more foods sweeter and sweet ones cheaper. Increase of such consumption contributes to the obesity rate. The point is, inexpensive raw food "materials" can have a downside. Maybe less corn isn't as bad as it sounds?

reedjosh 6y ago
I wish corn/wheat weren't subsidized. Half of a typical supermarket is filled with artificially cheap grain based product. The `stick to the perimeter` mantra about how to buy healthy food is directly related to the fact that grain based products tend toward the middle of most stores.
- jfengel 6y ago
  Unfortunately, that advice no longer helps you avoid artificially cheap grain based products. The meat counter, nearly always on the perimeter, is full of grain-fed meat. And the frozen aisle, former composed largely of frozen versions of the produce section, is now dominated by prepared foods that are fairly calorie-dense and nutrient-poor -- and made from those same grain-based products. There are good choices to make in both those sections. (Or at least, better choices.) And better than the shelf-stable products that are even more calorie-dense (because water makes things spoil) in the middle aisles. But it's become a lot more complicated than it used to be.

_rpd 6y ago

From the article ... > ACC has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since 1961, a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 7 years of productivity growth. The effect is substantially more severe (a reduction of ~26–34%) in warmer regions such as Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01000-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01000-1