Something else, that I'm shock no one really talks of, decrease in falling numbers for wheat. Wheat today has way higher alpha-amylase activity than it did not but fifty years ago. And every decade or so it is getting worse. Flour with higher alpha-amylase activity will not rise in the same way that flour with lower activity has.
So say you plant an acre of wheat and expect 3000 pounds of flour, but that flour has a low falling number value. No one is going to buy it, so now you have to plant say 1.05 acres and you take that 0.05 acres to enrich the content of the flour so that you have 3000 pounds of flour that people will buy.
You can see where this starts getting troublesome. At some point the falling numbers continue to drop, now you need 1.1 acres for 3000 pounds, ten years later you're now up to 1.25 acres to get that 3000 pounds and so forth. And we KNOW what is causing it. When wheat begins to germinate too early, you have increased alpha-amylase activity. Wheat germinates when you have unexpected rainfall when you shouldn't and then temperatures that fluctuate wildly. And the thing driving continued decreases of falling numbers is climate change, there's not even remotely a dispute about this.
We're having to grow more and more wheat and get less and less from the wheat. I mean it's not massive overnight changes, but when you look at scales like just the last fifty years, we're having to enrich wheat more often than not to hit gluten content assurances. That's a non-zero cost and it keeps going up, which in turn is making anything that's not unleavened bread, increase in price.
I don't know if anyone has done a study on this, but it's got to be costing everyone a bit of measurable money. It's absolutely happening in pretty much every wheat farmers haul on this planet in such regularity at this point, you just cannot pretend it isn't happening. And yet, I don't think I've ever heard anyone really discuss this very real and concerning thing that literally happening right in front of us, outside of maybe a few AG sites and what-not that regularly talk about it.
Yes. Financial institutions, including the Federal Reserve Bank, have been dragging their feet on anything to do with climate change because “it’s impossible to know the financial effects”, as if catastrophe can be financially managed.
This gives those of us that want capitalists and neoclassical economist to pull their head out of their asses some leverage.
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