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Cool article! I have no idea on the true scalability of it to billions of people, but Havana is a good example of low-tech high-yield food production that help

Cool article! I have no idea on the true scalability of it to billions of people, but Havana is a good example of low-tech high-yield food production that helped out when lots of people were going hungry in Cuba after the Soviet Union collapsed. A byproduct is that it's relatively labor-intensive to get high yield out of the small urban farms, thus providing extra good jobs. Would be interesting to see if these kind of low-fi solutions could contribute meaningfully to the problem of feeding 9 billion people in the coming years...

barry-cotter 17y ago
A byproduct is that it's relatively labor-intensive to get high yield out of the small urban farms, thus providing extra good jobs. Farming is horrible backbreaking, unending, relentless labour. A good job it is most emphatically not. My great-grandfather would no doubt think that modern farmers are total wusses, what with not having to even muck out horse stalls since we've now got tractors. Even so, farming is a crap job compared to the alternatives available to those capable of doing it properly for most of those capable of doing it. You have to be willing to work like a dog for a substantial portion of the year, and if you've got animals you never get any proper time off, ever. Being a small businessman in any other sector is a much better prospect financially, a hell of a lot safer (there's a reason why non-farm and farm work related workplace fatalities are reported separately) and you can live in something resembling an urban area. Oh, and extra good jobs? This is an example of what's variously termed the lump-of-labour fallacy or make-work bias. tl;dr Farming sucks
- stellar678 17y ago
  Your response is correct in the context of later 20th century farming when mechanization and subsidies allowed less labor to be involved, allowed food to become a commodity product, and vastly reduced market prices. Of course it's pretty well recognized that all of that is not a sustainable model and will need to work differently. I'm not recommending that we re-establish the farms that your great-grandfather worked on. There are higher-tech ways to produce. (Hydroponic greenhouse vegetable producers are a good example - they require more labor than planting fields with a tractor, but it's not the back-breaking labor of manually tending fields.) As for the financial prospects - if more people need food and less of it is available, prices will rise. From what I understand, this has played out in Cuba...people who grow and sell food outside the planned economy live quite well. The make-work bias is really only applicable if we're holding up two equivalent systems and I'm arguing for the more labor-intensive one because it is more labor-intensive. I guess mentioning the extra labor was kind of superflous because what I was proposing is that high-yield microfarming might play a roll in feeding more people in the future. More labor demand would just be a byproduct...

barry-cotter 17y ago

A byproduct is that it's relatively labor-intensive to get high yield out of the small urban farms, thus providing extra good jobs. Farming is horrible backbreaking, unending, relentless labour. A good job it is most emphatically not. My great-grandfather would no doubt think that modern farmers are total wusses, what with not having to even muck out horse stalls since we've now got tractors. Even so, farming is a crap job compared to the alternatives available to those capable of doing it properly for most of those capable of doing it. You have to be willing to work like a dog for a substantial portion of the year, and if you've got animals you never get any proper time off, ever. Being a small businessman in any other sector is a much better prospect financially, a hell of a lot safer (there's a reason why non-farm and farm work related workplace fatalities are reported separately) and you can live in something resembling an urban area. Oh, and extra good jobs? This is an example of what's variously termed the lump-of-labour fallacy or make-work bias. tl;dr Farming sucks

stellar678 17y ago
Your response is correct in the context of later 20th century farming when mechanization and subsidies allowed less labor to be involved, allowed food to become a commodity product, and vastly reduced market prices. Of course it's pretty well recognized that all of that is not a sustainable model and will need to work differently. I'm not recommending that we re-establish the farms that your great-grandfather worked on. There are higher-tech ways to produce. (Hydroponic greenhouse vegetable producers are a good example - they require more labor than planting fields with a tractor, but it's not the back-breaking labor of manually tending fields.) As for the financial prospects - if more people need food and less of it is available, prices will rise. From what I understand, this has played out in Cuba...people who grow and sell food outside the planned economy live quite well. The make-work bias is really only applicable if we're holding up two equivalent systems and I'm arguing for the more labor-intensive one because it is more labor-intensive. I guess mentioning the extra labor was kind of superflous because what I was proposing is that high-yield microfarming might play a roll in feeding more people in the future. More labor demand would just be a byproduct...