4 ms·

Yes, cities are the heart of America, but the country produces the blood. Urbanization is only possible through hyper-efficient exploitation of rural resources.

Yes, cities are the heart of America, but the country produces the blood. Urbanization is only possible through hyper-efficient exploitation of rural resources. We owe every technological advance, every great work of art, every soldier who defends us, to a farmer who refused to give up on a thankless, unrewarding career. Not being a rural guy myself, I feel like I owe them.

forgotmysn 9y ago
maybe 100 years ago, but not today. before the great depression, ~30% of the population worked on a farm. today, that number is closer to 3%. and most of them work on industrial farms where they can have a career. im not saying that we shouldnt be grateful, but i think folksy nostalgia of family farms and shit blind us from the realities.
- damnfine 9y ago
  Wow dude, go outside more often. Sure there are less farmers, but they are no less important. That is ignoring the natural resources, and your disagreeable prejudices.
  - forgotmysn 9y ago
    im a self-described fat-ass, i eat constantly. im not ungrateful to people who work in the agricultural industries, but im no more grateful to them than i am to those who work in energy, water or telecomms. they are all necessities, and farmers aren't that special.
pas 9y ago
> hyper-efficient exploitation of rural resources Can you expand on that a bit? > ... to a farmer who refused to give up on a thankless, unrewarding career. Why? How? What? Because food is relatively cheap? (Because supply is high?)
- OtterCoder 9y ago
  Sure. The rise of civilization has always had a fairly direct correlation with how efficiently we could extract food from the land. When we all lived as hunter-gatherers, we didn't get much done other than some cave art. With the rise of farming came the priestly class, and Ur, the first city. Plows, granaries, preservation, crop rotation, selective breeding, refrigeration, and so on, further increased the number of people a single farmer could feed. As fewer people were engaged in the act of feeding everyone, more craftsmen, artists, administrators, and so on, could push civilization forward. As a nearby comment notes, over the history of the US, we have increased the efficiency of our farms by a factor of ten, and a tiny fraction of people are actually needed to work the land. That said, farming is still a brutal business. For being an industry that determines whether hundreds of millions will live or die, farmers are typically faced with enormous debt burdens, long work days, and second jobs. It's a pretty screwed up situation.
  - pas 9y ago
    But nobody is forcing farmers to continue farming. If it's that brutal, drop the shovel, sell the tractor, fuck the cows, let's go trucking! And yes, for some reason society/civilization has a "market based" approach to food security. Why? Because it works better than the planned economy version. Maybe because it forces people to optimize, to make the hard choices of what do you really want, do what you're good at or do what you love. That said, markets are not in a vacuum, so we can and we ought to help people. Not just farmers. Because every time we try to help them we end up helping "Big Agribusiness". And if some people want to do farming, but it doesn't make them enough, okay, we can think about that, but I don't see what that has to do with food security, which comes from big industrialized farms, environmental protection, land management, food safety regulations, distribution chain tracking and inspections and so on. (To help small farms, you need scale. You need to pack them densely, have them share equipment - usually the combine that used only at harvest is owned by a 3rd party, and so on. They need insurance for climate events like against flood, hailstorm, tornadoes/hurricanes, spring frostbite and so on. So you end up running a farmer-K12.)
    - 9y ago
chrischen 9y ago
Nothing wrong with the rural land or people, but the people in less dense parts of the US are overrepresented. Which means a person not living in the city has more say in government, while paying the same or less in taxes.

forgotmysn 9y ago

maybe 100 years ago, but not today. before the great depression, ~30% of the population worked on a farm. today, that number is closer to 3%. and most of them work on industrial farms where they can have a career. im not saying that we shouldnt be grateful, but i think folksy nostalgia of family farms and shit blind us from the realities.

damnfine 9y ago
Wow dude, go outside more often. Sure there are less farmers, but they are no less important. That is ignoring the natural resources, and your disagreeable prejudices.
- forgotmysn 9y ago
  im a self-described fat-ass, i eat constantly. im not ungrateful to people who work in the agricultural industries, but im no more grateful to them than i am to those who work in energy, water or telecomms. they are all necessities, and farmers aren't that special.

pas 9y ago

> hyper-efficient exploitation of rural resources Can you expand on that a bit? > ... to a farmer who refused to give up on a thankless, unrewarding career. Why? How? What? Because food is relatively cheap? (Because supply is high?)

OtterCoder 9y ago
Sure. The rise of civilization has always had a fairly direct correlation with how efficiently we could extract food from the land. When we all lived as hunter-gatherers, we didn't get much done other than some cave art. With the rise of farming came the priestly class, and Ur, the first city. Plows, granaries, preservation, crop rotation, selective breeding, refrigeration, and so on, further increased the number of people a single farmer could feed. As fewer people were engaged in the act of feeding everyone, more craftsmen, artists, administrators, and so on, could push civilization forward. As a nearby comment notes, over the history of the US, we have increased the efficiency of our farms by a factor of ten, and a tiny fraction of people are actually needed to work the land. That said, farming is still a brutal business. For being an industry that determines whether hundreds of millions will live or die, farmers are typically faced with enormous debt burdens, long work days, and second jobs. It's a pretty screwed up situation.
- pas 9y ago
  But nobody is forcing farmers to continue farming. If it's that brutal, drop the shovel, sell the tractor, fuck the cows, let's go trucking! And yes, for some reason society/civilization has a "market based" approach to food security. Why? Because it works better than the planned economy version. Maybe because it forces people to optimize, to make the hard choices of what do you really want, do what you're good at or do what you love. That said, markets are not in a vacuum, so we can and we ought to help people. Not just farmers. Because every time we try to help them we end up helping "Big Agribusiness". And if some people want to do farming, but it doesn't make them enough, okay, we can think about that, but I don't see what that has to do with food security, which comes from big industrialized farms, environmental protection, land management, food safety regulations, distribution chain tracking and inspections and so on. (To help small farms, you need scale. You need to pack them densely, have them share equipment - usually the combine that used only at harvest is owned by a 3rd party, and so on. They need insurance for climate events like against flood, hailstorm, tornadoes/hurricanes, spring frostbite and so on. So you end up running a farmer-K12.)
  - 9y ago

chrischen 9y ago

Nothing wrong with the rural land or people, but the people in less dense parts of the US are overrepresented. Which means a person not living in the city has more say in government, while paying the same or less in taxes.