The most straightforward story of the data seems to be: When the EU took steps in the 1980s against overproduction like Milk Quotas the efficiency of agricultural production in the EU didn’t get better in the same way that efficiency in the US got better.
But if you factor out the individual countries Spain and Portugal did better than the US, so it might have something to do with different countries growing different crops.
“relative to 1961” label is doing a lot of storytelling here that isn’t necessary present in the original raw data
The most straightforward story of the data seems to be: When the EU took steps in the 1980s against overproduction like Milk Quotas the efficiency of agricultural production in the EU didn’t get better in the same way that efficiency in the US got better.
But if you factor out the individual countries Spain and Portugal did better than the US, so it might have something to do with different countries growing different crops.