[zimzam]

What are you talking about? Inexpensive food is a boon to society.

Cultivating food the 'old fashioned way' is incredibly labor intensive. We now have machines that allow us to cultivate far more food with far less labor.

For example, in 1900 corn took 38 hours/acre to plant/cultivate/harvest. In 2000 it took about an hour. The yeild per acre has also improved 3x-5x in that span, so the time per bushel has decreased to less than 1% of what it once was.

Of course the person spending 100+x the effort to grow corn will not be economically competitive - why would we want anything different?

https://www.lhf.org/learning-fields/crops/corn/

[mm263]

You are not making an argument you think you are making. We switched from one set of problems to another set of problems that didn't exist before industrial agriculture: soil erosion, pest explosion, entire harvests wiped out by disease because genetic uniformity, which means one pathogen can destroy everything - think Irish potato famine but now it's scientific and modern.

The mess of traditional farming - with its scattered plots, mixed crops, and local varieties adapted to every microclimate - was too complicated to tax and control, so they (that Xe talks about, *they*, the ones who stand to profit) bulldozed millennia of accumulated agricultural wisdom and replaced it with neat geometric fields of single crops that any bureaucrat could count from his desk. This wasn't just an ecological disaster waiting to happen (and it did happen - you not knowing about it doesn't mean that it didn't; maybe in the end you'll notice when our last species of corn dies out), it was also an epistemic catastrophe, a murder of local knowledge that understood why you plant these three things together here but those two things there, replacing it with the kind of simplified, one-size-fits-all stupidity that makes perfect sense in a government report and absolutely none in actual soil where actual plants have to actually grow.

Anyway, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

[ArcTugboat03]

This is an excessively romanticized view of traditional farming. If you look at the astonishing death tolls from famine throughout human history, including in living memory, it is pretty clear why, for all its problems, industrial agriculture is still a far superior approach.

Food security requires food production at levels which demand industrialized agriculture, for better or worse.

[bevr1337]

Maybe a false dichotomy. For ex, modern transportation could have been in service to sustainable agricultural models, providing resiliency between communities.

[mm263]

You are missing the point. The point isn't that the legacy methods of agriculture are unequivocally better. They have their downsides, some of the downsides are pretty severe. The point is that abolishing traditional farming in favour of industrial agriculture yielded unforeseen costs, the ones that were never even hypothesized when we started scaling agriculture. Now with AI and agents, we'll reap those unforeseen costs again. The profits will go into the pockets of the owners, the unforeseen costs (which include the costs of switching from one system to another) will become the society's burden to bear, as it was with industrial-scale agriculture.

[doitLP]

+1 on seeing like a state. But combining small plots into mega farms did create more food. It just did so at the loss of variety and knowledge and local control and ultimately freedom as you say. See enclosing the commons in England in the 18-19th century

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I need to finish seeing like a state and will defer to your expertise, but this raised a question in me: why are we still limping along if our farming techniques are doomed like this? Did we never adapt in recognition of the flaws of monoculture?

[mm263]

We adapted, that's why the pesticide industry is so big. I'm not a great agriculture expert, but from my understanding it's an uphill battle against nature and we are winning for now.

[AngryData]

I find that 38 hours per acre for corn figure a bit inflated as someone who use to plant 2 acres of corn each year using a 1901 corn planter and harvesting it by hand with my father. It never took the two of us more than a day to harvest the entirety of the corn, store it in our corn crib, and bundle all the corn stalks, while working at a fairly leisured pace. Tilling, fertilizing, and planting only took a day and only required one person for the first two, granted we did use a 1940 farmall tractor, but like I said its not like we were working at any real speed trying to get it done as if we needed it to survive. It was just a cheap and easy way to get corn to fatten up a cow or two before slaughter. It is also an absolutely miniscule amount of work compared to the amount of food it produced. Using 1900 corn yields (we didnt actualy weigh our own yields), it was over 3,000 pounds of corn, and it was likely much higher growing a more modern variety. Going by bulk grain corn prices at the local Tractor Supply the value rivals or exceeds the average local wage, and if it was sweet corn would surpass local wages multiple times over, so doesn't seem like a bad deal at all.

[stego-tech]

I was directly replying to the poster above me's own arguments in favor of "doing nothing". At no time did I denigrate inexpensive food, only highlighted that their own perspective that food production is unprofitable when it is in fact necessary for every human to survive, should horrify them.

That being said, if you're going to get on your data soapbox and try to tear down an argument I didn't make in the first place, then I will challenge you to "square the circle" between OPs argument that food production is not profitable; the fact 200 million children (and half a billion people globally) are malnourished; and that these stats are somehow acceptable in a world that collectively throws out a billion meals per day.