Facebook monthly active users

Facebook MAUs going up, organic farmland going up. Two completely different surfaces being cultivated at scale, on the same calendar. The cows are not on Facebook. Most of the Facebook users are not farmers. The numbers proceed without them.

Facebook MAUs grew from about 360 million in 2009 to nearly 3 billion by 2021 as the platform absorbed the global mobile internet. US certified organic farmland grew steadily across the same window as the National Organic Program matured and consumer demand expanded retail incentives for organic conversion. Two completely independent infrastructure stories of the 2010s — one social, one agricultural — sharing a window because the decade scaled almost everything that a network effect or a price premium could grow. Same era, different ground.

Networks and farms both expanded. The infrastructure of the 2010s was generous to both kinds of land.