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)
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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.
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Over the course of human history, it has been the same tale of minimum wages - those at the top of the money ladder consume and provide jobs for those at the bottom. Many view this situat
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I'd believe that if the majority of the human species wasn't struggling to survive. But I suppose, that's more of a resource allocation problem than a resource production problem is wha
Green roofs and victory gardens (Score:2)
I was thinking of green roofs, but corner office green houses had not occurred to me. I would like to add the backyard victory gardens of World War 2 as well.
Give them more credit (Score:4, Interesting)
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None of which actually CREATE goods- they just mess up the market with unproductive activities that are better done by government.
Just because someone's in a 'service' job doesn't mean they aren't useful, valued,
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Our entertainers, doctors and teachers all count as 'service' jobs. So are the graphic artists who design our toys and the advertisers who sell them to us. So are the truckers that bring us our food, the McMinions that cook it for us, and the lawyers that sue for us when we eat too much of it.
None of which actually CREATE goods- they just mess up the market with unproductive activities that are better done by government.
So you want the government driving trucks? And getting the corn from the farm to NYC is not productive? There not doing such a great job with Amtrak. Put aside the lawyers for a minute, all of these people provide real value.
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Better than that- I want the government running railroads! Actually, the government might not drive the truck, but they spent over $2 million/mile to give that truck a road to run on....
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 produc
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 re
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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.
I don't think subsistence agriculture is all that grand of an exercise in Creation. Likewise, the industrial factory job, 9-to-5 shift, doing the same thing over and over again, that would make up the bulk of an assembly line.... is more mind-numbing than "creative". The engineers behind these things may have been great Creators, but not the workers. As such, I'm hard-pressed to find something intrinsically wrong (for the workers) with the typical job moving from the one set to the other. Perhaps you can
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What the heck are you talking about? This may be true in practice, but that's only because we're vastly more efficient growing crops than we've ever been before... which is what this article is about. This isn't bad news, for crying out loud!
It certainly isn't true in principle that once a building goes up, that's it for agriculture for that city block. So what's the problem?
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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 t
That would work... (Score:2)
Except that the value of things is not, unlike some Libertarians like to think, totally contemplated within the market. You think if farmland's expensive, buildings will be torn down? I'd say, forests and other natural ecosystems will be torn down WAY before buildings are! Have you looked at the Amazon recently?
The fact remains, continued growth of the population will result in the destruction of fragile ecosystems long before it makes an impact (at least in the short term) to city dwellers. It's not like
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I also bet that once we start running out of food due to 'progress', buildings will be coming down anyway. More 'land' will be available for farming after the revolution, and building burnings.
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And it's also not strictly true. There are places in the world that have been built on, and had the buildings torn down later to make room for farming and other uses.
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Seriously, most buildings deteriorate into nothing with 100 years of inattention.
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
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10,000 years of incredible human engineering isn't going to end with something as simple as "we've developed all the farmland".
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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, Interesting)
While true, it's unlikely it will ever happen. Barring a collapse of civilization (did someone mention Huns at the door?) humankind will continue to engineer itself forward. Something "complicated" like an Indoor Farm may seem like an overkill, but it does have a lot of advantages over farmland. Not the least of which is control. We've already been engineering our crops and the soil. (Even the "organic" variety still use modern farming techniques.) Thus the next logical step is to engineer the farmland itself to better meet our needs.
Reducing the distance between the farms and the consumers could have a lot of direct benefits. One of which is being able to control and recycle the farm wastes means that open lands are cleaner and better smelling. Future city engineers may even look at ways of pumping filtered CO2 from the city's air into the crops, while pumping the resultant oxygen back to the city.
Lots of possibilities.
(And yes, I've been watching too much "Engineering an Empire" off of iTunes. Excellent show!)
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I agree, but a collapse of civilization is precisely what was being discussed.
In Zimbabwe, where agriculture has collapsed, shanties are torn down to grow gardens in urban areas.
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
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Actually, what do you think those late night helicopter flights are for? Grow houses kick off a lotta infrared unless you insulate the hell outta your attic. And your electric bill will go through the roof if you're growing under lights. Police have gotten warrants based on electric bills:
http://www.shakopeenews.com/node/722 [shakopeenews.com]
http://www.savagepacer.com/node/273 [savagepacer.com]
http:// [goldismoney.info]
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Interesting conce
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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
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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 McMansion
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Let's remember here, that whatever the dollar measure of which sector dominates the global economy, agriculture will remain forever the single most important facet of civilization. Nothing is more important than farming.
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So why aren't starving people knocking down buildings to plant crops now?
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:4, Informative)
As an example of a shortage in food supply, you only have to look at the milk shortage the UK faces. The major supermarket chains (Tesco, Sainsbury,
Source Sunday Times [timesonline.co.uk]
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Avoiding that is the whole point of agriculture in the first place!
I'm not sure that I'd agree with this. The major benefit of agriculture is that it allows for specialization: when you stop hunting-and-gathering and start farming, not everyone needs to spend their entire day involved in food production. This allows for civilization. A side-effect of this is that you can support much higher populations, but the real difference is in the specialization of roles. (Since a tribe of hunter-gatherers working off of some very good land can have a large population relative to th
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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
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't care to go into details right now, but you're wrong.
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Ignorance is not an excuse (Score:5, Interesting)
Ethanol is most criticized, and with due cause. Traditional methods of ethanol production (for instance) deserve criticism. Using only corn kernels is horribly inefficient, particularly when corn is a food source.
But the old ways are changing. The State of Georgia will host the nation's first cellulosic ethanol production facility [dailykos.com]. Cellulosic ethanol production is more than 15 times more efficient than traditional production methods. Any green biomass can be used: corn kernels, corn stalks, corn roots, switchgrass, cane sugar, tree chips, industrial green waste, and even pig shit. This is the future of biofuels.
Range Fuels is building the new facility in Georgia. They do not use any biomass also used as a food source for humans or animals. The Georgia plant will use industrial tree waste from the many paper mills in the region.
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More ignorance (Score:3)
What is more concerning to me is laws like the Atlanta city council is trying to pass, which would make visible bra straps illegal.
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I dunno, guess that depends on your definition of "food supply"...
"Soylent Green is people!"
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I'm not sure if someone else pointed this out but we're currently producing the most food we have ever produced in all recorded history. What you are noticing is probably the local reduction
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Yeah, it's a terrible shame how Westerners are starving to death. They're all skin and bones!
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The summary didn't say that worldwide food production was decreasing, just that fewer workers are employed in agriculture (relative to industry and services) than were in the past. At least part of that is probably due to more efficient production methods that allow the same or greater amounts of food to be grown by fewer workers. I don't know the actual statistics, but it would surprise me g
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We're so efficient at growing corn, our problem is getting it out of the midwest. Because of this, we "grow" piles of corn during the fall until it can be shipped to market for its end use.
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Newer Studies have contradicted your statement... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Newer Studies have contradicted your statement. (Score:2)
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All we're doing now is currently using huge stockpiles of non-renewing (or renewing on too massive of timescales) biomass to convert to energy. The biomass is essentially a large capacitor or battery that had stockpiled billions of years of the sun's energy. We keep thinking of newer and newer ways to drain this battery, and more efficient ways to extract that energy (or at least widen its pip
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Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:5, Informative)
Wilson Quarterly [wilsoncenter.org]
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Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:4, Interesting)
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There are a whole lot of factors that contribute to those increases, though. Probably one of the simplest is the affordability of irrigation. One of the most freq
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Iceage (Score:2, Insightful)
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Nice blog to get hits, but... (Score:5, Informative)
You'll note, from this article:
10,000 Years? (Score:2, Funny)
Food remains crucial though... (Score:2)
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Do you not see the inconsistency here? If prices have fallen, it's because supply is becoming ever more efficient and is outstripping demand. So in what sense has agriculture "fallen behind"?
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Supply is becoming efficient in a limited way, but not on a wide scale. Most of these savings are economies of scale, or cheap imported produce.
Large scale industrial farming generates a large amount of food available relatively cheaply. But, it's effectively off-shoring of your agriculture. It's cheap because a coun
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If this were true, how would it explain the fact that countries with among the highest labor costs in the world (USA and Canada, to name two) are enormous exporters of food, while lots of countries with low labor costs (the African countries, for example) are net importers?
It's cer
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What is the difference between cleaning a shirt and sewing a shirt. Both take raw material ("cloth") and turn it into the same product (clean shirt). But because the sewing typically involved purchasing the shirt and reselling it instead of simply 'taking possesion' of it and returning it, it is considered 'industry' while the cleaning is considered 'service'.
Similarly, there are a whole lot of "service" industries related to agricultu
grammar nazi time (Score:5, Funny)
(sic) "If you licked this posting, then please click here..."
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've never felt the urge to lick someone's blog.
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I just threw up...
Impossible... (Score:4, Funny)
Farming will always be there.
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)
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Well you could find out on your own, but for a moderate fee I could find out for you!
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Nation of industry = wealth, nation of services = bankruptcy.
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"Services" produces no significant value multiplier to time. Money (actual monetary value, not fiat paper) comes from value multipliers to time.
Mmmm... even ignoring the secondary assertion (I've yet to hear an explanation of money that rings completely true), it can sometimes. Engineering design work is a form of service good, which results in development of items that can give considerable time savings. Develop a better mousetrap, spend less time chasing mice. Even if I don't build any mousetraps myse
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Hasn't the West had a services-dominant economy for the past 40 years? In Canada [statcan.ca], Goods-producing industries: $336e9, Services-producing industries: $781e9 (Jun 2007, using 1997 CA$). If you are a university student, take a course in macroeconomics. It's very interesting stuff (unlike microeconomics).
The oldest profession (Score:2, Interesting)
Almost as soon as there were cities, there were temple prostitutes who, along with grain, formed the backing for much of the early currencies. These days the temple [google.com] is returning to "services" for backing of the value of its currency, but we must ask ourselves one simple question:
When subsistence agrarians are cut off from their lands through centralized land ownership, and wealth is
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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.
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People have been raiding livestock, burning crops, and salting fields since the dawn of time. And it has certainly been "disruptive". Upheaval continues to be disruptive, but these days the disruption is limited to subsistence farmers who become refugees. The further up on the economic scale you are, the more wealth you have sitting in spreadsheet somewhere that can be exchanged for real goods like food from far aw
old professions rarely die - they modernize (Score:2)
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Which prompts the question, what do the other 97% of the population are doing? Supervise? 'cause it doesn't appear the US ``produces'' much of anything now a days (besides...food).
The Third Wave (Score:4, Interesting)
To Anyone Horrified By This Development: (Score:5, Funny)
Get up at 4:00 a.m., slop the pigs, milk the cows, brush the horses, feed the chickens, cook breakfast, eat breakfast, hook up a plow to the tractor, plow the north 40 acres, meet the vet to see that sick heifer, drive to town and plead for another loan, buy feed for the animals and groceries for the family, drive home, cook dinner, eat dinner, pay bills, balance the checkbook, go to bed (9:00 p.m.)
Then get up the next day and repeat. And continue to repeat for two weeks (except Sundays - go to the church of your choice on Sunday and pray to God you survive another year). Then come back and complain.
Automation = Free Food (Score:2)
Extrapolating into the future, perhaps farms will be (almost) completely automatic. Everything will drop in price when automation is put into play. This is what I see as the cause.
For now ... (Score:4, Insightful)
A temporary aberration. After the Great Collapse of 2027, everybody that survived was learning how to grow food again.
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Funny)
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For this to make sense, you need to have an objective sense of the word "value". Describe to me, without any subjective principles, why a car is worth more than the raw iron ore, bauxite, plastics, leather, etc. of which it is composed. Then explain to me how manufacturing produces objective value in a way that "services" do not.
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That being said, many service industries exist by leaching value from others. Examples would include lawyers, brokers, etc.
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Guess you'd like to clean your own hotel room? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:6 Billion+ (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the jury is still out on this one, and most people consider programming to, in fact, be a service job.
The ultimate question is this: is a program real wealth or is it just something that has value? A piece of food or a building is real wealth in that it is something which can be used to directly keep a person alive or directly change matter/energy. The value of a piece of wealth may change, but its inherent utility does not (if we neglect things like aging and falling apart). A 1000 square foot house will still be a 1000 square foot house whether people are willing to pay $50000 or $500000 for it. An apple is still an apple regardless of its price.
Software is an admittedly difficult-to-classify area, because in one sense software is indeed a tool: it allows fast computation for design, or accurate control of machinery. In another sense, though, software itself is a unique type of good in that it is not economically scarce: once a particular bit of software is created, there are no practical physical limitations on the number of simultaneous uses of that software. This is the argument against considering software to be wealth.
I think the best way to divide "service" from "not service" is: is the result of the activity new wealth, or just shifting around of wealth? I understand that services create value, but that is different than wealth. Manufacturing and agriculture definitely create wealth; programming may or may not depending on how you look at it. Everything else is clearly a service, because it just shifts the wealth of manufacturing and agriculture around.
My take on the matter is simply this: I cannot eat a haircut, nor will readily-available newsfeeds keep the cold winter air away. An economy must produce wealth to survive; just providing services means that you're just a slave to whomever does in fact produce the actual wealth.
Read: Doctors, Lawyers (Score:2)
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