Let's go back in time. It's May 22, 2017. You're visiting Liberty and considering food prices. It's Monday and crop prices are cheaper than ever. A stack of 64 Carrots or Potatoes is going to cost you $4.

Don't worry, even you can earn $4. Pick anything - mine and sell Cobblestone, cut and sell Logs, dig and sell Dirt. At "The Farm" you could sell a stack of 64 dirt for twenty bucks! Food was literally cheaper than Dirt. There's no way that could last... Right?



On Tuesday, May 23rd a new Carrot Farm was introduced to the world. What's the difference? It was automated. And guess what? In Liberty Minecraft there's no subsidies for Crop Farmers. Carrot prices were obliterated! And it didn't stop there! The same technology was applied to Potatoes.

By Thursday, crop prices had collapsed 99% to 4 cents per stack! For the price of one Diamond a player could purchase 1.6 million Carrots or Potatoes. The collapse in prices meant our players might never go hungry again. And those cheap goods were being put to new and more valuable uses.

On May 25th Carrots and Potatoes replaced Pumpkins and Zombie Flesh as the cheapest way to produce emeralds, outcompeting another recent innovation which had driven down pumpkin prices. That was one year ago.

Today I'd like to ask three questions:

• How much do Potatoes and Carrots cost today?
  
• What's happened to our poor unsubsidized Crop Farmers?
  
• What effect has cheap crops had on our economy over the last year?
  

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