No subtleties; "more" doesn't equal "better". It
can, in
some ways, but there's no generalized way to make them mean the same thing--it depends entirely on judging criteria for both.
E.g., "good" in what way? That there's less manual labor now? (Not a function of having more land.) "Good" in the sense that ag companies tend to make more money on larger farms? "Good" in the sense that yields are (generally) consistently up? (Also not related to having more land.)
To make "good" meaningful you must strictly define what's "good", realizing that there are almost always other (possibly contradictory) criteria, and that what might be "good" in one sense may be "bad" in another.
In any case, my point was that "improvement" has a solely positive connotation. You could have said "8x improvement in farmed acreage", which sort-of implies an increase in acreage is "good", but why not just be accurate in the first place, and call it precisely what it is, which is an increase in average acreage?
