6 ms·

Fordlandia

157 points by codyjames 9y ago

Myrmornis 9y ago
The photos make it look like it's ruined today, but it's a fairly normal small central Amazonian town. There are nice beaches on the banks of the Tapajós nearby. The roads aren't great in the rainy season.
- gordon_freeman 9y ago
  I would have appreciated this article more if author were to add more photos of the well-functioning small town it has today .
ateesdalejr 9y ago
Oh, brave new world.
- Covzire 9y ago
  I didn't know much about Henry Ford when I read that book so I was a little amused at first that he would be a central background character of a futuristic novel. About halfway through I read parts of his biography and things clicked. Great book by the way.
oxymoron 9y ago
Rob Dunn also tells the story of Fordlandia in Never out of Season (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/031626072X https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/031626072X). It’s a quick and interesting read of why we need crop diversity, and has a couple of really interesting cautionary tales. The most enticing one to me was the story of how Cassava was saved from disaster in Africa. Somehow a certain mealybug crossed over from Cassavas native range in South America, and free from its one antagonists, it spread like wildfire and threatened the sustenance of millions. A few lone researchers tracked down the native habitat of the mealy bug in Peru, and identified a certain wasp that only prayed on that specific mealybug. They managed to introduce it Africa, thereby potentially saving millions from starvations. Dunn’s case for crop diversity is all in all pretty compelling. I try to pitch it when I get the chance, because it deserves more attention!
- nabeards 9y ago
  Oh how quickly the blight would destroy the rubber trees of Southeast Asia...
Stratoscope 9y ago
> Ford hadn’t bothered to learn anything about botany or agronomy before embarking on his Fordlândia experiment. He didn’t trust the kinds of experts that could’ve warned him what he was getting into. In fact, he didn’t trust experts at all — he was a figure-it-out type, skeptical of fancy educations and titles. > Rubber trees had never been grown in the Amazon in the way that the Ford company was trying to grow them: in dense plantations, with trees planted in tight rows. This growing style might have worked in the Southeast Asian plantations run by the Europeans, but that’s because the bugs there hadn’t evolved to eat rubber. In Brazil, this density ended up creating an environment where the native bugs that fed on rubber trees thrived. Basically, Ford built a giant bug incubator, where close proximity helped pests and blight spread. > Strangely enough, despite all of the time and money he invested in Fordlândia, [Henry Ford] never actually went to visit it himself. He had orchestrated the whole fiasco from his home, thousands of miles away, in Michigan. This sounds like a few present-day startups, such as the one I read about here a few years ago. Someone in SF met a fellow developer, and the conversation went something like this: "You work at a startup? Neat! What does the company do?" "We're disrupting parking." "Oh, that's very cool. So you've run a parking lot or worked at one, and that's given you some better ideas on how to run it?" "No, we haven't done any of that. You have to understand, we're not interested in doing things the old way. We're disrupting parking!"
- MrLeap 9y ago
  I wonder if that's an aspirational way to describe the fact that they steal cars.
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    That's a "Pyrrhic" way to disrupt parking. People won't hassle with finding a spot and paying, if they have no car.
    - MrLeap 9y ago
      Nothing pyrrhic about it. They're just relicensing the automotive industry's IP. Disrupting parking with yet another expression of the gig economy. Democratization of employment. You choose when you go to steal cars, they run the chop shops. Shorter commutes for most, improved foot traffic and they're making housing more affordable. It's like equifax, facebook or google. We all benefit.
madez 9y ago
> biopiracy What a load of. The privatization and capitalization of literally everything is crazy. I despise companies like Nestlé for trying to capitalize common goods like drinking water. This obsession on the one-dimensional metric of money makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
- taneq 9y ago
  Yeah, those Brazilian rubber barons sure spent a lot on R&D to develop those seeds.
- hueving 9y ago
  There is a legitimate argument behind treating water as a market good like anything else. There is an incredible amount of waste due to water rights in California (e.g. Almond growing during droughts) because water isn't sold in an auction. We obviously need some token amount guaranteed for drinking water. But the rest used for industrial and farming purposes should be auctioned by the government.
  - madez 9y ago
    I see the problems you describe, but if you sell the rights in auctions you once again boil it down to the one-dimensional metric of money. I think not just how much one is willing to pay, but also what it'll be used for, is relevant.
jimmcslim 9y ago
I can recommend Jóhann Jóhannsson's Fordlandia [1] (also responsible for the soundtrack to Arrival, and sadly recently deceased) as worth a listen, inspired by the Fordlândia experiment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlandia_(album) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlandia_(album)
- tomjakubowski 9y ago
  Oh no, I hadn't heard Jóhannsson had died. What a terrible loss. I'll be listening to IBM 1401, A User's Manual tonight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBw_wSoVQrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBw_wSoVQrY
RickJWag 9y ago
At the time, I'm sure Ford's ideas were considered very progressive and a gift to the indigenous people. Today, he's the target of a critical article like this one. (There's more criticism of Winston Churchill on HN today, too.) My theory is that the world has become so prosperous (at least parts of it) that people have no idea what's good and what's not any more.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Perhaps if you were, say, Indian, you'd feel less favorably disposed to Churchill, even if you did not live a life of opulence. You don't have to agree with someone else's perspective to be able to understand it.
- sbr464 9y ago
  Progressive is one way to put it. That and gift are not my words of choice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Jew https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Jew The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem
8bitsrule 9y ago
I liked the part where, thanks to Ford's Rules, a small off-property island nearby hosted a bar and sex workers. Also the enforcement of the 8-4 shift, despite workers being used to avoiding the hottest hours of the day.
nimbius 9y ago
Ah the paragon of american assembly line manufacturing, Henry Ford. As a millennial its taken me a while to get the real dirt on the guy, as in america highschools extol only his virtue. Did you know Ford had his own secret police after he doubled the salary of his workforce? To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married. he created a division within the Ford Motor Company to keep everyone in line. It was known as the Ford Sociological Department Henry Ford’s paternalism even extended the point where you needed the company’s permission if you wanted to buy a car, which included a requirement to be married and have children. https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-police-ruled-his-wo-1549625731 https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-poli...
- shard972 9y ago
  How much of those policies Ford was implienting can be attributed to the culture of the time? I understand in today's culture such a pushing of family values is pretty much illegal but i wonder how many other companies at the time had similar kinds of policies.
  - eecc 9y ago
    Adriano Olivetti, although much later in time didn’t hoist his demands on the workforce. He did lay out a huge amount of benefits that nobody in it’s right mind would complain about though... yet most of this drive died with him, as the rest of the Italian industrials preferred confrontation and stashing of their material proceedings abroad in Switzerland... perhaps it had something to do with the witchunt against anything remotely Socialist
  - kjs3 9y ago
    Probably a lot. He was a virulent racist and anti-semite as well. So he's got that going for him.
- verylittlemeat 9y ago
  Captains of industry who liked to play simcity in real life were not unusual for the time. One of the worst strikes in American history started over "company town" issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike This is really the ongoing story of organized labor vs their corporate overlords. If you want to see real interviews and video from what living in company town with secret police is like check out the documentary Harlan County, USA.
mberning 9y ago
Milton Hershey did something very similar in Cuba. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-cubas-hershey-where-an-american-experiment-ended-bitterly-hopes-stir/2015/05/05/87d40942-e84d-11e4-8581-633c536add4b_story.html?utm_term=.9b78ccd016ba https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-cubas-h...
Kronopath 9y ago
The part of the article that starts with this paragraph is particularly enlightening: > In implementing his vision, Ford faced cultural and climactic obstacles. People in Brazil were, for instance, used to working in the early morning, then taking a break during the hottest parts of the day, and later coming back to work. This didn’t fit with Ford’s ideal nine-to-five workday. Also, back in the States, Ford had created an industrial system where workers could actually afford to buy the products they made, but in the Amazon there wasn’t that much to buy. “There was no consumer society within the Amazon so they didn’t actually need the high wages that Ford was promising,” Grandin elaborates. So “they would work a few weeks or a few months and then they would disappear and … go back into the jungle to work their plots, to produce their own food, and maybe they come back the following year, and this would drive the Ford managers mad.” Ford’s turnover-reducing strategies didn’t work in Amazon like they had in Detroit. This is a great example of how you can't just transplant a culture and expect it to work flawlessly. Cultures evolve to fit the environment that surrounds them, and attempting to blindly copy things that worked in one environment, and assuming they'll work in another, is folly.
emmelaich 9y ago
Previously discussed with respect to a Guardian article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324004

157 points by codyjames 9y ago

The photos make it look like it's ruined today, but it's a fairly normal small central Amazonian town. There are nice beaches on the banks of the Tapajós nearby. The roads aren't great in the rainy season.

gordon_freeman 9y ago
I would have appreciated this article more if author were to add more photos of the well-functioning small town it has today .

ateesdalejr 9y ago

Oh, brave new world.

Covzire 9y ago
I didn't know much about Henry Ford when I read that book so I was a little amused at first that he would be a central background character of a futuristic novel. About halfway through I read parts of his biography and things clicked. Great book by the way.

oxymoron 9y ago

Rob Dunn also tells the story of Fordlandia in Never out of Season (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/031626072X https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/031626072X). It’s a quick and interesting read of why we need crop diversity, and has a couple of really interesting cautionary tales. The most enticing one to me was the story of how Cassava was saved from disaster in Africa. Somehow a certain mealybug crossed over from Cassavas native range in South America, and free from its one antagonists, it spread like wildfire and threatened the sustenance of millions. A few lone researchers tracked down the native habitat of the mealy bug in Peru, and identified a certain wasp that only prayed on that specific mealybug. They managed to introduce it Africa, thereby potentially saving millions from starvations. Dunn’s case for crop diversity is all in all pretty compelling. I try to pitch it when I get the chance, because it deserves more attention!

nabeards 9y ago
Oh how quickly the blight would destroy the rubber trees of Southeast Asia...

Stratoscope 9y ago

> Ford hadn’t bothered to learn anything about botany or agronomy before embarking on his Fordlândia experiment. He didn’t trust the kinds of experts that could’ve warned him what he was getting into. In fact, he didn’t trust experts at all — he was a figure-it-out type, skeptical of fancy educations and titles. > Rubber trees had never been grown in the Amazon in the way that the Ford company was trying to grow them: in dense plantations, with trees planted in tight rows. This growing style might have worked in the Southeast Asian plantations run by the Europeans, but that’s because the bugs there hadn’t evolved to eat rubber. In Brazil, this density ended up creating an environment where the native bugs that fed on rubber trees thrived. Basically, Ford built a giant bug incubator, where close proximity helped pests and blight spread. > Strangely enough, despite all of the time and money he invested in Fordlândia, [Henry Ford] never actually went to visit it himself. He had orchestrated the whole fiasco from his home, thousands of miles away, in Michigan. This sounds like a few present-day startups, such as the one I read about here a few years ago. Someone in SF met a fellow developer, and the conversation went something like this: "You work at a startup? Neat! What does the company do?" "We're disrupting parking." "Oh, that's very cool. So you've run a parking lot or worked at one, and that's given you some better ideas on how to run it?" "No, we haven't done any of that. You have to understand, we're not interested in doing things the old way. We're disrupting parking!"

MrLeap 9y ago
I wonder if that's an aspirational way to describe the fact that they steal cars.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  That's a "Pyrrhic" way to disrupt parking. People won't hassle with finding a spot and paying, if they have no car.
  - MrLeap 9y ago
    Nothing pyrrhic about it. They're just relicensing the automotive industry's IP. Disrupting parking with yet another expression of the gig economy. Democratization of employment. You choose when you go to steal cars, they run the chop shops. Shorter commutes for most, improved foot traffic and they're making housing more affordable. It's like equifax, facebook or google. We all benefit.

madez 9y ago

> biopiracy What a load of. The privatization and capitalization of literally everything is crazy. I despise companies like Nestlé for trying to capitalize common goods like drinking water. This obsession on the one-dimensional metric of money makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

taneq 9y ago
Yeah, those Brazilian rubber barons sure spent a lot on R&D to develop those seeds.
hueving 9y ago
There is a legitimate argument behind treating water as a market good like anything else. There is an incredible amount of waste due to water rights in California (e.g. Almond growing during droughts) because water isn't sold in an auction. We obviously need some token amount guaranteed for drinking water. But the rest used for industrial and farming purposes should be auctioned by the government.
- madez 9y ago
  I see the problems you describe, but if you sell the rights in auctions you once again boil it down to the one-dimensional metric of money. I think not just how much one is willing to pay, but also what it'll be used for, is relevant.

jimmcslim 9y ago

I can recommend Jóhann Jóhannsson's Fordlandia [1] (also responsible for the soundtrack to Arrival, and sadly recently deceased) as worth a listen, inspired by the Fordlândia experiment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlandia_(album) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlandia_(album)

tomjakubowski 9y ago
Oh no, I hadn't heard Jóhannsson had died. What a terrible loss. I'll be listening to IBM 1401, A User's Manual tonight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBw_wSoVQrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBw_wSoVQrY

RickJWag 9y ago

At the time, I'm sure Ford's ideas were considered very progressive and a gift to the indigenous people. Today, he's the target of a critical article like this one. (There's more criticism of Winston Churchill on HN today, too.) My theory is that the world has become so prosperous (at least parts of it) that people have no idea what's good and what's not any more.

emodendroket 9y ago
Perhaps if you were, say, Indian, you'd feel less favorably disposed to Churchill, even if you did not live a life of opulence. You don't have to agree with someone else's perspective to be able to understand it.
sbr464 9y ago
Progressive is one way to put it. That and gift are not my words of choice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Jew https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Jew The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem

8bitsrule 9y ago

I liked the part where, thanks to Ford's Rules, a small off-property island nearby hosted a bar and sex workers. Also the enforcement of the 8-4 shift, despite workers being used to avoiding the hottest hours of the day.

nimbius 9y ago

Ah the paragon of american assembly line manufacturing, Henry Ford. As a millennial its taken me a while to get the real dirt on the guy, as in america highschools extol only his virtue. Did you know Ford had his own secret police after he doubled the salary of his workforce? To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married. he created a division within the Ford Motor Company to keep everyone in line. It was known as the Ford Sociological Department Henry Ford’s paternalism even extended the point where you needed the company’s permission if you wanted to buy a car, which included a requirement to be married and have children. https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-police-ruled-his-wo-1549625731 https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-poli...

shard972 9y ago
How much of those policies Ford was implienting can be attributed to the culture of the time? I understand in today's culture such a pushing of family values is pretty much illegal but i wonder how many other companies at the time had similar kinds of policies.
- eecc 9y ago
  Adriano Olivetti, although much later in time didn’t hoist his demands on the workforce. He did lay out a huge amount of benefits that nobody in it’s right mind would complain about though... yet most of this drive died with him, as the rest of the Italian industrials preferred confrontation and stashing of their material proceedings abroad in Switzerland... perhaps it had something to do with the witchunt against anything remotely Socialist
- kjs3 9y ago
  Probably a lot. He was a virulent racist and anti-semite as well. So he's got that going for him.
verylittlemeat 9y ago
Captains of industry who liked to play simcity in real life were not unusual for the time. One of the worst strikes in American history started over "company town" issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike This is really the ongoing story of organized labor vs their corporate overlords. If you want to see real interviews and video from what living in company town with secret police is like check out the documentary Harlan County, USA.

mberning 9y ago

Milton Hershey did something very similar in Cuba. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-cubas-hershey-where-an-american-experiment-ended-bitterly-hopes-stir/2015/05/05/87d40942-e84d-11e4-8581-633c536add4b_story.html?utm_term=.9b78ccd016ba https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-cubas-h...

Kronopath 9y ago

The part of the article that starts with this paragraph is particularly enlightening: > In implementing his vision, Ford faced cultural and climactic obstacles. People in Brazil were, for instance, used to working in the early morning, then taking a break during the hottest parts of the day, and later coming back to work. This didn’t fit with Ford’s ideal nine-to-five workday. Also, back in the States, Ford had created an industrial system where workers could actually afford to buy the products they made, but in the Amazon there wasn’t that much to buy. “There was no consumer society within the Amazon so they didn’t actually need the high wages that Ford was promising,” Grandin elaborates. So “they would work a few weeks or a few months and then they would disappear and … go back into the jungle to work their plots, to produce their own food, and maybe they come back the following year, and this would drive the Ford managers mad.” Ford’s turnover-reducing strategies didn’t work in Amazon like they had in Detroit. This is a great example of how you can't just transplant a culture and expect it to work flawlessly. Cultures evolve to fit the environment that surrounds them, and attempting to blindly copy things that worked in one environment, and assuming they'll work in another, is folly.

emmelaich 9y ago

Previously discussed with respect to a Guardian article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324004