My father is a (retired) farmer. Wheat is a pretty reliable crop that pays for itself, but you don't really make money on it. So, you grow some wheat, and you grow other stuff, such as canola, in order to get paid. With the elevated prices, a bit more wheat may have been planted this year, but you have to remember that the prices of the inputs have gone up as well, particularly fertilizer and fuel. Moreover, any land used to grow wheat is not growing something else. In the end, it doesn't make a lot of economic sense to increase wheat production when you can use the land and resources for higher value crops.

This is highly dependent on the area. My family has a background in wheat farming, I grew up in an area with a lot of family wheat farms, and if you are in an area with good soil and the weather is good you can make a lot of money on a wheat crop even in so-so international wheat price conditions.

They rotate in other crops for soil balance but YMMV in terms of wheat profits.

Fair enough, different crops do better in different areas. In your case, for reasons of crop rotation (which you mentioned), they are still unlikely to be able to substantially increase wheat production. Farming is one of the most "free market" industries out there. In most cases, everything is already highly optimised.

that would be easy if there was an AWS for Food!

Here is the reality, not only the grains but the inputs like fertilizers etc are sky-rocketing. Every body wants to piss of Fossil Fuels with out even understanding how foundational they are to Modern Civilization (I welcome the downvotes but I will not stop advocating).

Say, with me, N P K - Nitrogen Phosphorous Pottasium. Belarus is a major Potash supplier, Natural gas is important for Fertilizer production etc. These inputs are now expensive.

But the policy genius, LOVE Price Controls, so what prices do these guys love controlling, they target staples .. grains, rice etc.

Now if you are farmer, who has to invest more money given the increased cost of fertilizers etc. and the government will come and take away the grain below market rate -- are you going to play the game? That is the game in much of the developing world.. and to some extend even developed world.

So your AWS style solution of spinning another EC2 instance for Food does not work in the real world.

It comes back at us in all kinds of weird ways, too. Biofuel production, for example. Farmers make choices all the time to switch their production to be maximally profitable (example: Almost all of NZ shifting from lamb to milk production in the past few decades).

Biofuel production puts a spanner in things because previously we were swapping some form of consumable calories for another form of consumable calorie. But now you've got fuel production competing with food production, and their prices will begin to compete similarly. That inevitably leads to either cheaper fuel (spoiler: still not great for emissions) or significantly more expensive staple foods.

So any kind of squeeze on fossil fuel pricing leads to a down-stream increase on food pricing, one greater than just the energy use for production/transportation.

> the government will come and take away the grain below market rate

First, that rate is below what the market rate would without government farm supports. Second, the government doesn't confiscate grain. At least not in western countries.

I upvote you.

Everyone shits on fossil fuels with no idea how crucial they are. No fossil fuels. No modern society. Turn it off and death will follow.

Can't tell if this is a joke or not. One would think that if a farmer could raise output (and thus revenue) by 140% on short demand, they would have already done so years ago?

They can increase wheat production by growing less of other crops. Rationale: wheat is more profitable because of its scarcity.

I guess smaller shortages spread over many crops is better than a large shortage in one major crop. Here's hoping it all works out!

I tried copy and pasting certain paragraphs from the article here, (weather/price of inputs/farmer incentives/how wheat is purchased by nations/monetary policies/etc) but there are so many compounding global issues here one might just consider rereading the article instead.

It is quite a big deal.

LOL, tech guys (me included) are SO detached from real life.

This is not a "just spin up more AWS instances" kind of thing.

Doesn't help that the build pipeline takes a long time to complete. By the time the build is done, the needs may have changed. Agriculture is not good at iterative development, at least not rapid iterative development.

https://twitter.com/kannbwx/status/1528832246936920065 ok this doesn't look good at all, time to stock up people. preppers were right after all.

Based on your farming experience how difficult is it for the average farmer to more than double their wheat production?