“If you have a solution to this (individual crop choices unbalancing prices), I’d be glad to hear it.”
The bottom line is that prices and markets are are sent much more out of balance by central planners than they are by free markets with lots of individual choices. That is the moral of the story, in the article about the real experience in New Zealand.
Farmers don’t just dumbly bump along like lemmings, planting what everyone else plants - they think, worry and research long and hard on how prices might go, and what their best options are. Poor decision makers get weeded out over time. When New Zealand’s Government dropped their central planning and subsidy efforts, the individual decisions resulted in better growth, efficiency and profits. Nowadays, much more info is available to farmers to make better decisions.
Government planners are not playing with their own money, and are more motivated by political factors than economic factors - they always will be.
As in other areas of economics, the left promises (lies) to remove all the risk from life, if everyone will just put all the money into their hat and give them all the power to dole it out. They just skim off unnecessary overhead, skew incentives out of whack, and mis-allocate resource worse than professional farmers doing their best to make the best possible decisions in each of their cases.
For some time they can cover their inefficiencies with more more money mis-allocated from other people and industries - until they finally run out of other people’s money to spend, and the inefficiencies grow so big as to crash the whole economy (see the example of every centrally planned socialist experiment in history).
The thing that set me off in the article was the comment that production exploded (or something to that effect).
What happens when there is an over-abundance of a product. Does it’s value remain high, or does it drop?
It’s the old supply and demand problem/blessing.
My overall goal was to see farmers not have to bear the brunt of a well meaning policy that would bring more pressure down on them.
It was also my hope that well meaning production increases here wouldn’t harm farmer’s long term interests, or long term interests.
I don’t want to see this sort of thing again.