> Interestingly, farmers view water usage as a trade secret
I wonder why. Do slight changes in irrigation patterns have a significant effect on crops?
I wonder why. Do slight changes in irrigation patterns have a significant effect on crops?
There's an interesting Planet Money episode about it: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/12/732147345/the-water-marketpla...
We've already had that for years. Farmers don't want to make the structural investments required to get there. Water for farming needs to become prohibitively expensive for them to even consider moving away from their wasteful large fields. Tax the hell out of the land, too.
What takes an acre of land and 100,000 gallons of water (a crop of wheat grass) can be done in a building 1/8 of an acre, 90% lower water requirements if not more, and produce 6x more than what the open plot of land does, on a yearly basis, on average.
I did and proved that almost a decade ago. Looks like nobody still wants to listen.
I assume the farmers aren't trying to make money from the futures, they're just trying to not lose money. Their profits come from actually growing food. The futures are just there in case something bad happens. Right?
I can't speak for all farmers, but my family owns a farm and the futures market is huge in it generating money.
You can use the futures markets to hedge against bad crop yields, lock in profits for accounting and cash flow purposes, inform what crops you are going to grow. It's immensely valuable.
The meta markets in how and when you sell crops (pre sale on the futures market vs sale at harvest, vs store and wait for commodities prices to be ideal) is, honestly fascinating and so different from the image of the "farmer" in popular culture.