Pick a production system, then move the three conditions a producer in your county actually argues about. The returns update as you go. The question this answers for a county office is not what a farm earns on average, but how far it is from the line where it stops working.
Acreage is held at the size of the represented operation. How returns per acre change with the size of the farm depends on which costs are fixed and which scale with the ground, and that is settled inside the model rather than on a slider.
Net returns
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| Measure | Baseline | Scenario |
|---|
Break-even price
Break-even productivity
Every slider on this page is one proportional lever. In the model that produced these baselines, each of them is an outcome rather than an input: productivity, price and cost are simulated across a decade of conditions, and the result is a distribution of returns rather than a single number.
That distribution is what a county actually needs, because it answers how often a given operation loses money, not merely whether it loses money in an average year. It is not on this page.