[ghshephard]

I know in Canada, for the longest time (At least since the 1940s), a large family farm was a 1/2 section - or 320 acres . But nowadays, a large family farm ranges all the way up to 4 sections (1280 acres). 8x improvement in 70 years.

[davelnewton]

I'd classify that as an "8x increase" instead of "improvement".

[ghshephard]

I suspect I'm missing something subtle here - are you proposing that a single family, (with a bit of extra help during harvest), being able to farm 8 times more land, isn't a good thing? And, based on what I've seen of the tractors these days (air conditioners, enclosed cabs, hell, little beer cooler to boot!) - the work, while hard, is also somewhat less backbreaking than it would have been in the 1940s as well.

[davelnewton]

No subtleties; "more" doesn't equal "better". It can, in some ways, but there's no generalized way to make them mean the same thing--it depends entirely on judging criteria for both.

E.g., "good" in what way? That there's less manual labor now? (Not a function of having more land.) "Good" in the sense that ag companies tend to make more money on larger farms? "Good" in the sense that yields are (generally) consistently up? (Also not related to having more land.)

To make "good" meaningful you must strictly define what's "good", realizing that there are almost always other (possibly contradictory) criteria, and that what might be "good" in one sense may be "bad" in another.

In any case, my point was that "improvement" has a solely positive connotation. You could have said "8x improvement in farmed acreage", which sort-of implies an increase in acreage is "good", but why not just be accurate in the first place, and call it precisely what it is, which is an increase in average acreage?

[ghshephard]

Ah, I see what you are getting at. I guess, you would also say, that storage density hasn't improved 1000x in the last 20 years, but "increased". And that the rate of death from automobile accidents per 1 million miles traveled since 1950 hasn't improved, but, "decreased".

I guess I wanted to combine both an objective and subjective assessment in a single word, which admittedly while not precisely accurate, got across my meaning.

I was actually hoping you were going to give me a traditional marxist response that we should not seek to decrease the amount of labor per unit of production, (that decreasing the amount of work per bushel of wheat is not an improvement) - I had an answer for that!

[davelnewton]

I actually would say increased/decreased in those situations, but I think most people (myself included) would also say those were improvements--they don't come with any significant costs, whereas large-scale ag does have associated, often negative, side-effects.

Tragically for our "argument" I believe doing less work for the same output is a good thing, at least in general. But even that has associated costs that aren't always "good" given current conditions :/