After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates 332
Peter S. Magnusson writes "As reported widely in business and mainstream press, the ILO recently released world market employment statistics. Most outlets focused on US economic competitiveness vs. China and Europe. Few noticed the gem hidden away in the ILO report: for the first time since the invention of agriculture, farming is not the biggest sector of the global economy — services is. (Aggregate employment numbers often divide the economy into agriculture, industry, and services.) Workers are now moving directly from agriculture to services, bypassing the traditional route of manufacturing."
To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Iceage (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:4, Insightful)
What really disturbs me though is that we've gone from a race of creators, creating goods with agriculture or manufacturing, to a world wide economy of McJobs that pay minimum wage and create NOTHING.
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Developed land is replacing farmland because agriculture gets more and more efficient, not because of some law of thermodynamics.
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:3, Insightful)
The glorious thing about having an economy is that the value of using that land as building space versus using it as farmland is openly weighed. One may tend to think that once a building is up, it's there to stay because in our economy, plant output has been getting progressively more efficient so the demand for farmland is slowly decreasing. This is why buildings that are put up tend to stay up. If we lived in a society where the demand for veggies was increasing and the only way to meet demand was to make more farmland, the price of veggies would go way up and people would do anything from growing them in any free backyard space to tearing down buildings when it becomes more profitable to use that land as farmland instead.
A good real-world example is the demand for parking in large cities is increasing. I know of quite a number of buildings which were torn down because they would be more profitable just to have a space to park a car.
Sure - until the oil production skids (Score:3, Insightful)
Once we start sliding down the back end of the depletion curve, fertiliser will become increasingly expensive, as will pesticides. Farming will become more labour intensive, and farming will, again, dominate the economy, as it always has and always will.
Enjoy living in Atlantis, while you can.
RS
But is it only a Bubble like the Dot Bomb era? (Score:4, Insightful)
less agricultural folks is NOT a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, the argicultural "miracle" we are currently seeing, is borrowing from the future to pay for itself in terms of environmental damage. You should really be worried when growing food hurts the environment, it really shouldn't be that way.
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Any ecological population in nature that grows towards the capacity of what the environment can sustain encounters growth regulating factors that limits growth, and eventually levels the growth at certain numbers. These factors are: competition, decease, predation and stress (dogs eating puppies, harder territorial fights etc). This leads to improvements in the genetic pool, keeping the overall population strong as specimens that are sickly, weak or have other non-benefitial mutations are removed from the pool, and provides nutrition for those who make it. It also stimulates long-term adaptation to the environment. It's really quite stunningly beautiful...
That is, unless your apply it to humans of course, and live by modern society values such as human rights (which we hold dear, and are bloody well right to do so!). I'm afraid the times coming up will try us very hard, and in the process make sparse what today defines being a good human: love and respect, a chance for everyone, right to personal development and education, right to equal share of good life and resources, forgiveness.
People who have tried to apply purely biological principals of the strong man's right to survive has gone down in history to be seen as demons that once walked amongst us.
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it replaces farmland because cities grow out into previously rural places, and smaller farms sell out because they can make more money by selling the land than farming it. On the industrial scale, farming is more efficient. But it doesn't account for most of the loss of farm-land.
If what you were saying, farms in rural areas would simply congeal into a big mega farm.
I know both Toronto and Ottawa in Ontario (Canada) have steadily been expanding into what was once some of the best farmland in the country. There's an ever-diminishing number of farmers who haven't sold out. For the most part, it goes away due to subdivision growth, not anything to do with the efficiency of farming.
When you get many miles of subdivision occupying what used to be very arable land, that farmland is taken out of the pool. Increasingly in the west, food comes from rather far away since we're using the land for roads and houses instead of farming.
I can only imagine that if you look around the western world, you'll find lots of places which used to be good farmland have suffered the same fate. Unfortunately, it would take a massive amount of upheaval to cause people in suburbs to start tearing down their homes and streets to start on subsistence farming.
Cheers
It's already being done (Score:5, Insightful)
Pot grown inside has little chance of being discovered; the only way to be found out is by letting someone know it's being grown there.
Outdoors, insects are a problem. Indoors the insect problem is easily controllable.
Pot grown outdoors has seeds, which weigh far more than the pot itself, taste bad, and produce no high. Indoors the male plants can be pulled befors they produce pollen.
Outdoor crops are prone to drought and overwatering, even floods. If indoor pot is overwatered, it's the farmer's fault.
Indoors, pot is easily cloned. One can find one great plant and clone it, producing what toiday's potheads call "hydro". It's believed by smokers that pot grown hydroponically is of higher quality than pot grown in dirt, but given the same genetics, either farming method will produce the exact same quality, and the clones are exectly the same potency as their parent plant (given the same amount of light, water, and fertilizer).
OT for the subject but on topic for this post, It's ironic that the War On (some) Drugs has produced more potent drugs! Today's pot is all seedless bud, while 1970s pot had stems, seeds, and leaf. And the bud itself, even without the seeds, is up to four times as potent as the 1970s bud. And without the "war", it's possible that crack cocaine might never been invented (or been invented yet). Prohibition not only doesn't work, it exacerbates the problems it is supposed to solve. Alcohol prohibition had America in a domestic, gang-fueled bloodbath, and often the illegal hooch had very harmful impurities, often produced by the government itself. Likewise, reefer prohibition had the Feds spraying paraquat on outdoor crops, sickening and killing American potsmokers (there is no lethal dose for unadulterated reefer) and contributing to pot's being grown indoors. Cocaine prohibition is producing the same gang-fueled bloodbath as alco hol prohibition did, and possiby was the cause of crack being invented.
When my daughters were in high school, one made the astute observation that you could buy pot, coke, and crack in school. I asked if you could buy beer in school? The answer is "no". So please think of the children and legalise drugs!
-anonymous coward
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're confusing cause and effect, though. Farming becomes less profitable so the farmers have to sell to developers. If there were really danger of impending famine because of the loss of farmland, turning farms into townhouses wouldn't be profitable. (And in the doomsday scenarios people are invoking, knocking down McMansions to plant potatoes certainly would be.)
Re:Selling each other imaginary stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't get civilization, do you (Score:3, Insightful)
That's an interesting statistic. That would mean the government spent 8 Trillion on our highways alone, which is probably what you are referring to. The rest of our road system doesn't cost nearly as much. You can pave a road pretty cheaply.
And getting the corn from the farm to NYC is not productive?
For two reasons- one is that it's usually more efficient to put the people where the food is rather than trucking it hundreds of miles, and the other questioning whether ANYTHING goes on in NYC that is actually productive instead of just an overhead drain on society. No, trucking does not create a new product- and shipping in this day and age, except for a few rare earth metals, is just a waste of resources.
Further evidence that you don't have a clue what you're talking about. It's cheaper and more efficient to build computers in one city and ship them to another than it is to create a computer manufacturing plant in every city. (Consider that it costs billions to build a state-of-the-art plant and paltry millions to ship everything from it). Interestingly, the same applies to almost any product, including food. Obviously you never took any economics classes, which makes sense given your nickname.
The bit about Amtrak I'm not going to argue with- I don't know enough to discuss it, and you're probably correct anyway.
Moving goods and bits of paper around is negative value that destroys local producers.
This is another case of not knowing what you're talking about. Sure, a global economy sometimes destroys local producers, and sometimes enables them to help more people. But it's certainly not negative value. If I can make and ship you a computer for cheaper than you next-door neighbor can, you could argue that I'm destroying his business. But how am I producing negative value? You're better off, the trucker who brought you the computer is better off, and I'm better off. Your neighbor who produces computers hasn't even lost anything, since you were under no obligation to buy his products in the first place, and he still has the inferior computer you could have purchased from him. (You might argue that the trucker's damage to the environment hurts more than the money you have saved, but consider that he would probably be driving near your city/town/village/hut anyway, so you're only a few blocks out of his way. You could donate a single dollar that you saved to the Arbor foundation and have a net positive impact).
For now ... (Score:4, Insightful)
A temporary aberration. After the Great Collapse of 2027, everybody that survived was learning how to grow food again.