After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates

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."

Comments

To me, the really sad thing is...

[AltGrendel]

...once you take land out of agricultural use, it is never used for agriculture again. By that I mean the growing of crops. Once a building is there, that's it.

Re:To me, the really sad thing is...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Not necessarily. You can always put a green roof on the building. You can also use corner offices for greenhouses. Especially Southwest and Southeast corners.

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...

[MyLongNickName]

And, yet, starvation rates world wide are going down. Perhaps the issue is distribution, not supply? Also, the fact that food is a smaller percentage of the economy does not mean that the amount of food is decreasing. If the rest of the economy per capita is increasing by a positive rate, then it will naturally outstrip food which is not going to be consumed at an every increasing per capita rate.

Re:To me, the really sad thing is...

[gomiam]

I would like you to explain why do you say that. AFAIK, current crops and current agricultural methods provide more food per surface unit (and I'm not even getting into account hidroponics): mechanization of the work allows to plant and seed at the optimum growth distance, and current crops usually require less space per plant to grow and produce the same amount.

Re:To me, the really sad thing is...

[gstoddart]

Developed land is replacing farmland because agriculture gets more and more efficient, not because of some law of thermodynamics.

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

But is it only a Bubble like the Dot Bomb era?

[abb3w]

Semi-seriously. I'm not sure the services-dominant model is sustainable.

less agricultural folks is NOT a good thing

[cats-paw]

fewer people making food makes the agricultural system more sensitive to disruption whether due to political upheaval, new and exciting crop pests, weather misfortunes, etc... Many folks on slashdot realize the advantages of decentralized, i.e. distributed systems, and it's an especially good thing for food production.

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.

It's already being done

[Anonymous Coward]

However, it's being done by people growing illegal crops - marijuana. Growing marijuana outside has many disadvantages; pests (both insect and law enforcement), seeds, thieves (both pot smokers and pot law enforcers), weather, etc.

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

For now ...

[ScrewMaster]

After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates

A temporary aberration. After the Great Collapse of 2027, everybody that survived was learning how to grow food again.