Slashdot Mirror
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."
...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.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Over 10.000 years there wil be an iceage... no, farming will not dominate then.
Question: Are Chinese gold farmers in the service or agriculture industry?
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
You'll note, from this article:
Caution should be used, however, where the information refers only to employees or only to urban areas. For some years in certain countries, the sectoral information relates only to urban areas, so that little or no agricultural work is recorded. Also, there is no data culled for the vast majority of African nations, where the sector of choice would be agriculture. So, to sum it up - your blog about the rise of services vs. agriculture could only be considered partially correct, at best.bu bu bu... God only created the earth 6,000 years ago!
Yes, I did RTFA, and I think the following is only one example in the blog of why one should proofread one's works or at least get an editor to do so.
(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.
For that matter... is Phishing and Pharming agriculture or service industry? There certainly seems to be no shortage of people employed doing that.
As long as games like WoW exist.
Farming will always be there.
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
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Semi-seriously. I'm not sure the services-dominant model is sustainable.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
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.
Absolute statements are never true
Read Alvin Toffler's 1980 book _The Third Wave_ which predicted with uncanny accuracy just how this would play out. Stay ahead of the next 10,000 years.
--
make install -not war
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. 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.
Since there is no real value to having someone clean your hotel room, you might as well do it, right? And cook your own burgers? Why do they have chefs, why not just have the customers cook their own etouffee? Maybe if we drive to Iowa to pick up our own corn, we won't have to push money around without adding value. From now on, I'm going to roll my own sushi!
In July of this year, a study (Study: Organic Farming More Efficient) was published that found that organic farming methods can produce up to 3 times more food than more 'conventional' methods... just wanted to add to the debate!
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 certainly true that the US (for example) buys nonlocal produce, but that isn't because we aren't growing enough to feed ourselves. It's because we grow huge surpluses of stuff that we don't need (like rice and soybeans) so we (effectively) trade it for stuff we want (like avocadoes in January).
Obviously not true, or else all the other grocery stores would have no customers.
OK, but if/when this happens, then prices go up, which helps out all the other suppliers. Look, you're essentially arguing that suppliers have no control at all over prices, and that consumers control everything. This is obviously false, since food prices have been rising faster than inflation lately (in the US).
Naturally, but so what? Any unexpected shock to supply or demand is going to cause sudden changes in price. This doesn't say much about the industry - it just expresses a law of economics. You aren't going to able to change this. (However, what you can change is whether or not it causes famine. Did the recent E. Coli spinach scare cause any risk of famine? No, because there's plenty of substitutes that we have huge surpluses of. So even if the price of spinach did some crazy roller-coastering, the effect on the consumer was basically inconvenience, not an empty belly.)
Of course we have, and we've been able to for decades. I think it's easy to argue that these days, all famines are caused by (a) government control, (b) wars, and (c) disasters. All of which affect the distribution networks, not the supply.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
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. Just because someone's in a 'service' job doesn't mean they aren't useful, valued, and improve the human condition. It also certainly doesn't mean they make minimum wage. (Sure, the McMinions will make minimum wage, but it's not like the assembly line workers or grunt farmers are doing any better for themselves).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
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 agriculture that were ORIGINALLY done by the farmer.
For example, trucking the food to the market, counts as a service, but used to be done by the farmer.
Less obvious are things like the commodity markets. When someone buys a pork belly future he is in truth taking on some of the agriculutral risk which USED to be born by the farmer. Yet the entire agricultural commodity business is counted as a "service".
We have changed our definitions far more than we have actually changed the amount of effort we put into supplying us with food.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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
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.
What?
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.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
It is heartless to deprive men of their mates via de facto monetization of female fertility within corporate and governmental harems.
Seastead this.
What is more concerning to me is laws like the Atlanta city council is trying to pass, which would make visible bra straps illegal.
Economies are not zero-sum games.
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....
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).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I have been reading "Deep Economy", and it argues the case that the larger modern farms (as most smaller ones have now consolidated or disappeared) produce more food per dollar than farms of the past, however to do this they use vast amounts of excessively cheap energy given to us by oil. They also use petroleum based fertilisers etc etc. Historical farm practices developed before mechanised farming was driven by oil and diesel produce more crops per unit of land, and are less energy intensive, simply because the farmers had to make a living off a small allotment of land, and did not have an abundant supply of energy. These days it's all about driving down costs, and this can be done by increasing the size of a farm to push down overheads. The margins are so low in that business now, there is little choice about how you think of efficiency, it has to be efficiency in terms of dollars. It's more efficient in terms of dollars to buy more land, than to hire more labour to reduce (cheap) energy costs, or to use that labour to further maximise yield. A lot of the historical farming methods also utilised free energy in forms like encouraging animals that would eat the weeds and not the crops. I doubt energy efficiency and other forms of efficiency will become a focus until there are large changes in our economic system, or legislation that ties somethings dollar value closer to it's energy input and environmental cost values. At this point it is far cheaper to just burn some extra oil, than to make your process more efficient.
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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think the points you raise are unquestionably true, to argue against them is to demonstrate some severe ignorance.
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 pipes for more watts per second). We're using it for everything from getting to space to farming to arguing over the internet. Eventually, whether next year or 3000A.D. it's going to start becoming harder and harder to access this energy, ultimately resulting in it drying up.
Really, this "efficient" farming as we see it is robbing peter to pay paul. It's like saying your hand-cranked flash light is more powerful than mine, while you have a 9v you found lying on the ground hooked up in series. Eventually, it's going to drain.
I venture to guess, however, by the time energy supplies start diminishing and drives the price up, we'll find some more cost effective energy.
Allow me to correct myself, my post was hurried.
I didn't mean unquestionably, I wrote it - but it was wholly inappropriate. It was far too much of a blanket statement. I should say that I wasn't debating on that point, and as far as the future is concerned, I suspect that will hold. If such evidence is presented to the contrary, I certainly hope I'll be in a position to evaluate it.
On my third paragraph, I meant "This efficient farming..." to mean the farming with tractors, petroleum based fertilizers, etc.
Finally, I hold the opinion that it's not unreasonable for us, the human race, to exploit our resources to the degree that it gives us a better quality of life. If this means draining the battery, as it were, I think it's totally appropriate. The question I'm sure your book poses, and I've posed to myself on many occasions, is if we will recognize these resources are running low, and how we will compensate.