[ASalazarMX]

Farming produces more food than needed, so you can feed others. Technology just makes farming more efficient, so a smaller percent of the population needs to farm. As long as there's still potential for more farming, population growth means more farmers producing food. If you exhaust the planet's resources for farming, or climate change reduces it, more people won't mean more resources anymore.

[aristofun]

Why do you think farming is a linear game?

What makes you think it’s impossible to get food from other sources that we didn’t invent yet and would probably not even call “farming”?

[ASalazarMX]

I think it's easier for the concept of farming to evolve as technology advances, than the production of food not being called farming anymore. Food made in labs could be considered farming, yeast cultures like the ones in Asimov's Foundation could too.

As the sibling comment mentions, only things like Star Trek's replicator could be considered beyond farming, as you're using the same pool of resources used to other activities besides feeding. In this case, farming and mining would be interchangeable.

[aristofun]

>> I think it's easier for the concept of farming to evolve as technology advances, than the production of food not being called farming anymore

Why are you so sure that your current speculations would have any sense 200 years from now when some agricultural breakthrough happens. The one we can't even dream about today.

And this is the pattern that has been happening all the time through humankind history.

[ASalazarMX]

I'm just speculating that mass production of food will still be considered farming in the future, but you're right, I can't know.

[aristofun]

I bet even the "consumption" or "feeding" itself might undergo some unexpected changes

[cercatrova]

Indeed, it reminds me of lab grown meat, or lab growth anything for that matter. Didn't Star Trek have a machine that could make any food possible just by putting molecules together? That's not farming and yet it could feed people.