Still trying to figure this out.

You know, I really don’t understand the crop acreages out of Westlands.

Year: Net Cropped Acres
1993: 486,116
1994: 496,990
1995: 531,632
1996: 549,704
1997: 546,118
1998: 545,309
1999: 530,697
2000: 503,208
2001: 485,086
2002: 579,645
2003: 563,633
2004: 560,670
2005: 560,547
2006: 559,744
2007: 568,547
2008: 568,627
2009: 568,652

OK, I’ve slept on this. But now I am really confused. According to their own crop reports, Westlands grew crops on its second highest acreage since 1992 last year. Since the drought began in 2007, they’ve been cropping an extra seven or eight thousand acres a year. What is going on?

Dr. Michaels, if cropped acreage isn’t down (and in fact is at near record highs), why would any farm jobs be lost? Have you guys been running models on reports of fallowed land, assuming that everything that was fallowed must have been taken out of production? That doesn’t seem to be the case. Cropped + fallowed doesn’t look to equal some constant acreage number. I don’t understand.

Confusion:
Maybe fallowed acreage is in a different district. Then why is Westlands leading this charge?
How are they counting up the new fallowed acres? An extra hundred thousand of them seem to have appeared. Is this because they ate Broadview? Are they counting lands as retired that they had never counted before?
This echoes the USDA crop reports, which show 1-3% declines, not hundreds of thousands of acres.
Peltier talked sorrowfully about bankrupt farmers. Did they plant but not harvest? Which does the crop report acreage refer to?

I don’t get this.

LATER: I got an explanation. Net Crop Acreage is NOT the same as acres harvested.

If you look at page 12 of the Annual Drought Report, they also say that 568,562 acres of land were cropped. Then they report that only 359,000 of them were harvested. 217,000 of them weren’t. Which goes a long way towards explaining the missing fallowed acreage.

Hope y’all weren’t as confused as I was. Thanks to the folks who explained it to me.