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."
I can fix that!
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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".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Question: Are Chinese gold farmers in the service or agriculture industry?
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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.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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I don't care to go into details right now, but you're wrong.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
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.
Wilson Quarterly
-Dave
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.
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!)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
As long as games like WoW exist.
Farming will always be there.
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.
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?