American agriculture is dedicated toward optimizing the productivity of agricultural workers rather than agricultural land. Historically (and currently), the United States has a large amount of relatively unused land and a comparatively tiny population to work it.
So the productivity of the land isn't a concern. The goal is to have a system where one guy can produce enough food for 400 people.
There are some implications of moving in the other direction that you might not like. In the one-farmer-feeds-400-people model, food is very cheap because it represents a trivial amount of work. In a model that devoted more resources to cultivating the same land at higher yields, one of two things would happen.
The less likely option is that food would become much more expensive because of all the additional labor. This would preserve the general standard of living of Americans, except of course that they'd all be much poorer because so much of their money would be spent on food. But they'd all be poorer together.
The more likely option is that the price of food would only rise a little, and a class of extremely poor people would provide agricultural labor. This would be a blow to American egalitarianism.
> American agriculture is dedicated toward optimizing the productivity of agricultural workers rather than agricultural land
At least with respect to corn, US farms produce 4 tons per hectare more each year than the global average, and have substantially higher yields than the 4 nearest competitors[1].
> the United States has a large amount of relatively unused land and a comparatively tiny population to work it
We've actually increased forrest cover substantially in the last 50 years, which is great.
This is a really fussy question, but I notice something odd in your link:
> The typical farm in Brazil produced corn and soybeans in 2020. Corn was a second crop following soybeans and was produced on approximately 78 percent of the typical farm’s acreage during the five-year period.
For corn to be a secondary crop following soybeans, at the same time it's produced on 78% of the farm's acreage, something has to be weird. Either soy is so much more productive and valuable than corn that its yield can be worth more while less than a third as much land is devoted to producing it (why not just grow more soy?), or a given acre might sometimes produce corn but more often produce soy over the five-year period, while being counted as "an acre used in the production of corn".
Then, the productivity of the farm is given in yield per hectare. But we've already seen that "hectares" is a funny measurement. What's the yield per hectare-month?
Also, this is fully compatible with American strategy being to use as little labor as possible:
> Labor costs as a proportion of total costs were relatively higher for the typical farms in Russia and the Ukraine.
(Annoyingly, the article's chart doesn't display the detail the article discusses. But "operating costs", the category that includes labor, are anomalously low for the US, beating everywhere except Argentina.)
On that model, high productivity per acre would be more of a happy coincidence.
Not relevant to the topic, but sad:
> Economic profit for the five-year period was positive for the typical farms in Argentina and Ukraine. [But not for Russia, Brazil, or either US farm.]
Yeah the economics of farming are pretty tricky and it is easy to end up in an apples to oranges situation. Corn is tricky as well, because ThenUS is so dominant in that crop so that surely displaces some growers.
I’m not discounting the labor angle entirely, but there seems to be some consensus that for at least some crops US farms are quite productive.
So the productivity of the land isn't a concern. The goal is to have a system where one guy can produce enough food for 400 people.
There are some implications of moving in the other direction that you might not like. In the one-farmer-feeds-400-people model, food is very cheap because it represents a trivial amount of work. In a model that devoted more resources to cultivating the same land at higher yields, one of two things would happen.
The less likely option is that food would become much more expensive because of all the additional labor. This would preserve the general standard of living of Americans, except of course that they'd all be much poorer because so much of their money would be spent on food. But they'd all be poorer together.
The more likely option is that the price of food would only rise a little, and a class of extremely poor people would provide agricultural labor. This would be a blow to American egalitarianism.