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My grandfather, rest his soul, was a 3rd generation rancher and farmer. He bought 2 John Deere tractors in the '80s and used them for 35 years. They are still b
by macinjosh 7y ago
My grandfather, rest his soul, was a 3rd generation rancher and farmer. He bought 2 John Deere tractors in the '80s and used them for 35 years. They are still being used to this day on the ranch.
Growing up, I visited the ranch regularly. Farming and ranching is very hard on equipment so the tractors often needed repair. My father and grandfather could seemingly fix anything on the tractor without even needing to go to the parts store. (The closest one was a 1 hour drive). Without this capability my family never would have been able to make a living of any kind with their land.
In 2020 farmland is being gobbled up by corporations. The family farmer is going extinct. That means tractor companies are getting a whole new customer who is nothing like the previous. Corporations want tractors as a service, they want them to be self-driving, and they want to manage them in bulk. They don't really care if they can repair them because they pay someone else to do it.
Personally, it is sad to see this change since so much of my family history and memories are tied up in the way things used to be. I sometimes feel out of place in my family because I couldn't fix a single thing on a tractor. On the other hand my grandfather didn't touch a computer in his entire life.
The world changes and sometimes it sucks but that is how progress is made.
- earlINmeyerkeg 7y agoThe greatest innovation in the history of mankind was a land consolidation. It took what 100 peasants all making enough food for subsistence living to 100 peasants be able to make enough food for thousands of people. It's not sad, it's progress.
- zorpner 7y agoIt's not sad, it's progress. These are not mutually exclusive concepts.
- kristiandupont 7y agoIndeed. Also, many things that are good in moderation are bad in excess.
- temporalparts 7y agoIt's sad that progress must mean sadness for some. We should have better social safety net so that displacement doesn't mean despair.
- macinjosh 7y agoWhile the financial/livelihood component is a major factor I think most of those affected, if asked, would say that is the least of the reasons for their sadness. It is the intangible things being lost and the end of a way of life that causes the most pain IMHO.
- earlINmeyerkeg 7y agoYou're right. I think I personally just get so incredibly upset with people who always look toward the past or are just mortified of change. I associate the sadness with their fear of change.
- macinjosh 7y agoProgress on a societal scale for certain. Sadness on the personal scale as new generations mourn the loss of their family's historical way of life. Both can exist :)
- earlINmeyerkeg 7y agoThat only exists on a generational level. The generations born afterward will never know about it, and therefore not care because it wasn't embedded in their cultural perspective. It's like taking a childs binky away. Over time, you totally forget why you even had the thing in the first place.
- cpach 7y agoNo need to be condescending.
- sl1ck731 7y agoThe same could be said for robots displacing humans in factories or trucks or anywhere else. That doesn't make it less sad for people's whose livelihoods depend on those positions just because its technological progress.
- wolco 7y agoWhat is the fear around robots? Machines have been displacing human labour for the last 100 years.
- cmcd 7y agoDuring the industrial revolution hard labor jobs transitioned to maintenance work for the machines. The problem is as we improve at automation the need for non-technical maintenance decreases. A small team of engineers can displace thousands or tens of thousands of workers without creating any new opportunities.
- wolco 7y agoIt frees up a population to do other work. A small team of engineers can create a platform that creates something new to work on. Second life clothing shop for example that would not exist without machines displacing humans.
- mrb 7y ago«A small team of engineers can displace thousands or tens of thousands of workers without creating any new opportunities.» A corporation that did that would have significantly increased its profits, and this new wealth is often (not always) indirectly redistributed to society. For example the corporation could increase its production (ie. hiring more workers), or increase salaries/bonuses, or increase stock buybacks (therefore benefiting stock owners whoever they are), or spin off new business units, or decrease the prices of their products/services to further improve their competitiveness (hence benefiting customers), etc. Rarely does a corporation sit on piles of cash doing nothing (one notable counter-example: Apple.)
- dwnvoted2hell 7y agoI wouldn't call it all progress. I mean, we require fertilizer and pesticides today. There was a time when neither was needed.
- trhway 7y agoit is a great progress, yep. We just always implement it in a sad, social darwinism style, way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JEYHczRar8&list=PLwcGjCE72Unr2EgwZSc3uYiOpYiDlUolK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JEYHczRar8&list=PLwcGjCE72U...
- andrepd 7y agoLand consolidation can be done through communes/co-ops, in which case the benefits of increased productivity are fairly distributed, or through private corporations, in which case profits are privatised and concentrated on a small owner elite class.
- jessant 7y agoNothing stopping people from doing that.
- ahoy 7y agoThere is an enormous body of law in the US that incentivizes a top-down corporate business structure and disincentives a co-op business structure.
- jessant 7y agoI think human nature incentivizes top-down corporate business structures and disincentivizes co-op businesss structures.
- apt-get 7y agoWhich is why 75% of France's farmers belong to an agricultural cooperative?
- cpach 7y agoAre those profitable though? Farming is heavily subsidized by the EU.
- Apocryphon 7y agoAnd American agriculture is likewise heavily subsidized by the federal government.
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- Amezarak 7y agoThis particular progress makes us vastly more vulnerable to a catastrophic systems collapse. A lot of small, independent farmers are more antifragile to natural events than a few giant megacorporations. We're optimizing for profits at the expense of disaster.
- 8bitsrule 7y agoHere we are, in a time when the shortcomings of centralization are rabidly apparent -across the board-. Counting that as some kind of win can only appeal to those who believe they are winning. For all the rest of us, the cheerful irony is more than a little disarming. Efficiency and longevity can be inversely proportional. May the reductionists alone reap their crop.
- jv22222 7y agoI heard somewhere that the greatest innovation (the most impactful at the particular stage of our evolution) was the bicycle, because, it enabled human cross breeding over much larger distances at a much faster rate than possible before.
- Armisael16 7y agoThat seems rather implausible given that railroads came about at the same time.
- jv22222 7y agoWell, there would be a lot more bicycles and they could go a lot more places a lot faster, no? I.E. They would enable a much faster rate of genetic mutation.
- jeffrallen 7y agoAlso isn't it a lot more comfortable cross-breeding in a sleeper car than on a bicycle? (Asking for a friend.)
- Armisael16 7y agoNo. Bicycles were heavy, uncomfortable products for the first ~40 years of their existence. Rubber tires and pedals didn’t come to bicycles until the 1860s. By that point the US had >30k miles of extensively linking most of the northern states. The modern bicycle didn’t really come into being until the 1890s. I’m having a hard time getting numbers for track in Europe, but the UK was the real pioneer and Germany followed quickly.
- jv22222 7y agoWell, clearly, wherever I heard that from was a terrible source of information! I stand corrected!
- lmm 7y agoHow affordable was railroad travel? Even assuming there was a railroad in the right place, would people have been able to go back and forth often enough for courtship?
- vonnik 7y agoWho says progress can't be sad? The consolidation you're talking about was a massive disruption, which brought a lot of change to families and societies. Most kinds of change are painful even when they lead to greater efficiency. While the transformation of agriculture has led to great prosperity, prosperity also brings hierarchy; i.e. more unequal social forms. Much of the US has transitioned from a relatively agrarian and egalitarian society to one that is much richer, but also less equal and more divided, in the last 150 years. There are clear tradeoffs in that transition, which some people might call the march of progress. Ways of life die off, and those who knew them in childhood often regret their passage, regardless of whether the world's wheat production increases.
- durge 7y agoYou should read 'The Storm Before the Storm' by Mike Duncan. It details the fall of the Roman Republic and highlights the role played by land consolidation and the social dislocation that gave rise to the empire. For better or worse, it was definitely less stable.
- ydb 7y agoIt looks like the neoliberal cult of "progress" has its acolytes on Hacker News, but that really shouldn't surprise. What is sad, though, is the distinct lack of empathy that this ideology instills in its adherents. Leaving people behind is not a sign of progress; instead, it's a sign of an ill society.
- danem 7y agoI'll take being able to feed the entire world's population more affordably than ever over the jobs of a small group of people in a rich country. This isn't to say the government should play no role in cushioning those affected by progress, but the progress has been undeniably good.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoProgress implies improvement. s/progress/change/
- danem 7y agoAnd how haven't things improved for the vast majority of people on Earth in regard to food security?
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThe dependence on fossil fuels goes so deep that we may end up having to choose between going hungry and overheating the planet.
- carapace 7y agoWell, it's interesting, we now have obesity problems and other issues brought on by our very success. "Too much is always better than not enough." But too much still brings trade-offs. Further, consider that, since the invention of artificial nitrogen fertilizer[1] we have been converting oil into humans[2], and population growth is the main driver of environmental impacts. Food security is an illusion: if anything ever interrupts the production of nitrogen fertilizer in a serious way billions of people will starve. Jared Diamond called agriculture "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"[3] We cannot judge the benefits of our civilization just yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process circa 1910 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population Look at the graph, notice that it curves up sharply circa 1925-1950. [3] http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/Readings/Diamond_WorstMistake.pdf http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/Readings/Diamond_Worst...
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoThe end of peasantry was long before the rise of corporate, industrialised agriculture. Like so many human activities, fashions, and innovations, the reduction in numbers required to work the land started off providing a benefit and ultimately went much too far. Looking at the destruction such as algal blooms in countless water courses from over fertilisation, steady soil erosion, loss of wild flora and fauna caused by industrialised agriculture and the colossal fields with a single crop, as far as the eye can see in every direction, it's hard to call it progress. It's change. Milk in shops is older than it was, homogenisation allows older milk to pass without notice. It's not progress, and hasn't been for quite some considerable time. We have large, pretty, consistent fruit and vegetables, but there's been a 50% decline in nutrient content since the war, and a similar decline in taste -- frequently replaced by sugars. We've hugely increased systemic risk from use of monocrops as all it takes is a single virulent disease to put the entire world's production at risk -- see bananas. Even the productivity gains are overstated. On the old mixed, family farm the raw individual crop productivity was far lower, but the chickens, pigs and plants overlapped such that the waste of one provided food or fertiliser for the others, the animals provided some degree of pest control, and as a whole the productivity was far better than usually assumed. Industrialisation begets simplification, begets monoculture, for the sake of profit not progress.
- joshuahughes 7y agoThank you for taking the time to give a detailed response here. I’ve always found it astonishing that the side-effects of ‘progress’ like diminishing nutrient content and environmental impact are so willingly ignored. Feeding more people is a positive, but it’s rather a hollow victory if their well-being and health ultimately takes a hit.
- holoduke 7y agoYes maybe the word progress is wrong. It should be control. In the end the goal of human kind is to take control of every square inch on this planet. Farming has shown some real advancing examples of this principle
- Waterluvian 7y agoThanks for sharing this about your grandfather. > The world changes and sometimes it sucks but that is how progress is made. This touches on something I think a lot about. Massive driverless farms, in my mind's eye, looks like one puzzle piece towards the utopia of the future. But you do lose the human aspect. It reminds me of Star Trek where Picard is working with his hands on a vineyard. Capitalism is abolished so he does it just for the human reasons. There's no way he can compete with a replicator. So that leads me to thinking about how we're in a really tight spot. The "human" present (past?) of salt of the Earth people making our products with a human touch and passion vs. the demands of the future utopia we want(?). It's a tight spot because capitalism mode is still active. The people who want to be passionate about their craft still have to compete commercially. In a future it might be that they can do it just because that's what they feel like doing. (super tangent: that reminds me of the "Primitive Technology" trend on YouTube where people re-discover technology just for the heck of it) It also reminds me of a response I once got. I regularly use farriers as an example of a skilled job that has pretty much gone obsolete because of automobiles. Someone once responded, "have you seen a farrier at work? It's art."
- macinjosh 7y agoI like to think that these advances allow us to spend more of our time finding and creating new kinds of art. The common factor between now and then is humans. Humans are artful beings so I am not worried about losing that. We'll just have to look to different places for it.
- pm90 7y agoYou make an interesting point. I think ideally what we want is: * easy automation for those that need it; if corporations want to driverless tractors doing all their farming, so be it. They're responding to a market that is demanding a lot of cheap food. * occupation as a choice; the productivity gains from automation shouldn't all just pile on to the people who made the investment; but it could be used to provide necessities to those that need them. So a small scale farmer, for instance, would not be competing directly in the same market as the corporation, and they wouldn't need to make a profit to do what they want to. Human brains are great at seeing patterns; we shouldn't be wasting them on repetitive work that can be mechanized. Let people do what they want to without existential threats and see what happens. In a certain sense, this is already true for the wealthy. The nature of wealth is that it gives you safety nets to fall back on if you fail at what you want to do. A lot many of the greatest artists came from wealthy backgrounds. I would honestly want a lot more people creating art, video games, curing cancer etc. than have more people picking crops.
- steveklabnik 7y agoI come from at least three generations of cattle farmers. My dad had to work a tool and die job, because unlike his father, it was already not possible to raise a family via family farm. It's really brutal.
- dumbfoundded 7y agoI actually think the trend is starting to reverse. At least in the area where I live in Ashland, OR where I have a 10-acre farm. What I'm seeing is products are becoming more and more niche. Kind of like how craft beers became a thing. I think it's easier than ever for a farm to create specialized products and sell them directly to consumers. Before this way of ecommerce tools, it was nearly impossible for a small farm to sell without a broker or distributor or wholesaler. These people consolidated to give pricing power ie Tyson Foods which then forces farms to consolidate in this race to the bottom. By eliminating middlemen, direct to consumer sales is better for the consumer. It's cheaper and products are better and more specific. In my industry distributors want to make 15% and retailers want 40%. Paying for the shipping is almost always cheaper than buying it in a store. You'll also generally get better products. Really the only reason to buy from a store is convenience.
- tixocloud 7y agoIn the short or medium term, do you think going niche can be a viable family business 2.0? Has it been challenging having to manage the customer side of things?
- steveklabnik 7y agoI hope it works out for you! My dad didn’t live to see these changes, unfortunately, so my family farm is now gone.
- armenarmen 7y agoYour soul source of income is from a 10 acre farm?
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- tomjen3 7y ago>Personally, it is sad to see this change since so much of my family history and memories are tied up in the way things used to be In some ways I can relate to that, but that is an extremely dangerous trap to go down.
- EETruth 7y agoPerfect, they should bring back serfdom and have the filthy rurals work and keep it quiet. Might allow them to go to church every Sunday tho.
- NicoJuicy 7y agoTractor as a service will only bite them back. Look at how popular 40-year old tractors are :) It's never been a better time to create a good old repairable machine.
- unapologetic 7y agoThey all want to get to the point of being Tesla. Hiding features only in software, pushing out updates, and trying to bake in a living (recurring revenue) model. It's a problem for a lot of reasons. First off it's the complete death of ownership. I can't fix things. At some point they will probably just lock stuff back down if I want to sell, assuming I can even sell without them getting a cut. Second, repairability takes a nosedive. It's no longer a tough but simple piece of machinery that I can maintain indefinitely with some mostly fairly easy to teach skills. I'm an amateur, but I know enough about how cars work that I'm willing to try and fix most issues, up to the point of needing specialized tooling. Instead it's a world of more expensive parts, DRM, and things that just won't work without a dealer authorized repair. Then we get to the part where I come off an old fuddy duddy. I don't want a car where someone can push safety critical changes the way we push shitty software updates now. I don't trust them to get it right. I don't want to be sold a car that tries to kill me after a mandatory software update. It's not needed, and it's a bad idea.
- hinkley 7y agoStated another way, every company has discovered 'rent-seeking' in a relatively short period of time and they all think it's neat. Consumers haven't pushed back enough to stop this from happening.
- SQL2219 7y agonice thought, I had to look it up again: The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of a feudal lord who installs a chain across a river that flows through his land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee to lower the chain. There is nothing productive about the chain or the collector. The lord has made no improvements to the river and is not adding value in any way, directly or indirectly, except for himself. All he is doing is finding a way to make money from something that used to be free.[4]
- johnchristopher 7y agoDo you think end-users products from corporation style farms are cheaper than family farm (for equivalent quality) ?
- satya71 7y agoThe quality from the corporate farm is probably worse. But the buyer is a distributor that doesn't really care about quality. Corporation can use financial engineering, economies of scale, and low pay to make profit from an otherwise unprofitable farm. Sometimes they can strong-arm modestly profitable farms into a sale.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoInitially yes, but through consolidation they will form 2 or 3 huge megacorps that control our food supply. It won't be pretty.
- AngryData 7y agoCheaper, yes, but currently corporate agriculture is less sustainable as they make little to no efforts in maintaining or building the top soil depth, and instead reap the soil for marginal yield gains and then buy out the small 75+ year well tended farm and do it all over again. Eventually having decent farm land is going to cost a premium and food price will rise because of it. Short term gains for long term costs.
- oh_sigh 7y agoIndustrial agriculture would still be cheaper than bespoke farming even if they were good stewards of their soil, if only because of economies of scale.
- F_J_H 7y ago>>currently corporate agriculture is less sustainable as they make little to no efforts in maintaining or building the top soil depth How did you come to this conclusion? I'm close the industry, and in my experience, corporate farms spend a great deal of effort maintaining soil, which includes using drones to visually inspect crops to see where soil may be lacking certain nutrients based on foliage color analysis.
- ken 7y agoIt sounds like the "pets / cattle" metaphor is finally returning to actual ranches. I don't think software is eating the whole world but it's eating that one. That tells me it's ripe for disruption.
- m463 7y agoHobby farm with printed tractors running on the gig economy.
- twoflower9 7y agoDoesn't sound like progress to me
- refurb 7y agoIs family farming better than corporate farming? If so, why?
- graycat 7y agoMy FIL had 88 acres in NE Indiana, grew corn, winter wheat, and soy beans and raised 40,000 chickens at a time. Not all the farmers were making money, and when they went out of business there were auctions. Soooo, my FIL got his farm equipment, including tractors, used at the auctions. And he did his own repairs: I remember sitting with him at Christmas at his kitchen table with a little mechanical part, precisely machined, part of the fuel injection system. He had me looking at the part, including the moving part, to see if it could be the cause of some problem he was having with the fuel system. So, yes, he did his own repair work. Heck, for his house he got plans from Better Homes and Gardens and did nearly all the work himself. For the baseboard heat, he innovated and made the parts himself. He did the carpentry to make his own kitchen and dining room tables and chairs, living room coffee table, etc. For the chickens, he mixed his own feed, and for that built his own feed mixing facility with, yes, used parts. He would include corn, 55 gallon drums of anchovies from Chile, etc. At the time, there was money in chickens due to suddenly progress in breeding, nutrition, and disease control. For the chicken houses, he got plans from the USDA and built the houses both longer and wider than in the plans. He used no concrete and had tar paper for the sides and roofs. For the floors, those were dirt, and between batches of chickens he would use his tractor to clean out the floors and then spread wood shavings. For feeding the chickens, he designed, patented, and built his own feeders -- so the chickens have to eat all the feed and not just pick out the corn which is their favorite. He learned the hard way that he had do to his own marketing: Some grocery store chain would promise to buy the whole flock of 40,000 but when the chickens were ready would find an excuse to delay, say, a sale on beef or pork. A delay of a week meant that had to feed the chickens for another week, and there went most of the profit. So the store would string him out until he would sell below cost just to get rid of the chickens. So, he did his own marketing: He worked with a guy who did big chicken dinners for large organizations. Then the dates, quantities, and prices were all SET in advance. Smart. Eventually due to NE Indiana winter snows, the chicken houses sagged a LOT, but by then he was out of the chicken business and head of the local electric power cooperative! So, building the chicken houses cheap paid off! Others built tiny chicken houses with concrete floors, cinder block walls, and tin roofs, outlast the Pyramids, and long since standing empty as the farmers went out of business. Yup, gotta be smarter than the average hick to be successful in farming!
- heavyset_go 7y ago> The world changes and sometimes it sucks but that is how progress is made. Progress for whom? Seems like a false dichotomy to me.
- halbritt 7y agoI speculate that as corporations take over farming, their operations become more efficient providing greater yields per acre and for the amount of fuel consumed. If true, this is net positive for humanity as a whole as more people can get fed and there are less carbon emissions doing so. There is the problem that corporations tend to trend toward becoming sociopathic entities unless carefully managed, so it's not all win.
- mrpopo 7y ago> there are less carbon emissions doing so. Intensive farming as practiced by corporations today is among the worst culprits regarding carbon emissions. It is more profitable to practice intensive till-heavy farming since it takes advantage of the nutrients already stored in the soil. The disadvantage is its unsustainability. After few decades of soil-tilling, it becomes quite poor in nutrients, and will have reduced yield. Corporations can afford to destroy land and move on to the next one, until nothing is left. This is opposed to regenerative/conservative agriculture. https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/regenerative-agriculture https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/regenerative-agricul... https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/conservation-agriculture https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/conservation-agricul...
- halbritt 7y ago> Intensive farming as practiced by corporations today is among the worst culprits regarding carbon emissions. Relative to what? What are the CO2 emissions per bushel of grain for the practices you've described? My point about reduced carbon emissions is specific to corporate farms using modern equipment which is more precise, thanks to auto-guidance via GPS, more efficient, as a result of the diesel engines being more modern and also as a result of other technologies that allow the tractors to have larger implements, travel faster, and consume less horsepower and finally lower emissions as a result of being compliant with more recent emissions standards.
- tintor 7y ago"Corporations want tractors as a service" Those same self-driving-tractor-as-a-service companies can offer service to farmers also!
- mikorym 7y agoYou need a way to reconcile the family side of things and the corporate side. It may be sad to lose the personal touch of a single owner single farm (I always say you know it's corporate when the owner doesn't personally sign off each birthday present) but one should also see the value of a business becoming a company. One important thing is that a healthy business will survive any particular person's death. And this is very important especially for a family business. Imagine a farmer suddenly passing away in his 40s or 50s with 5 children and no other adult that can take over the business. (This actually happened in my family, but luckily his wife was a badass and saved the farm during a difficult period when other farms were going out of business.) Another advantage of a business as opposed to a single owner is that the rest of the family is afforded a niche. In my case, I can do scientific analysis, mathematics, music and lots of other things and at the same time I don't have the burden that my grandfather had when he had to run the then very poor and tiny farm at the age of 16. With regards to the loss of character and the loss of the idyllic romantic image of a farm with its owner: It will happen to a smaller or larger extent and it's really a challenge to figure out how to retain the initial pioneer spirit of a farm. In my case, I decided to prolong the legacy of those before me by focusing on what I can do that they couldn't. I have quite a few useful innovations that I am working on in weather and agricultural analysis. But it's difficult, and maybe I won't achieve much, but I feel the only way to personalise a corporate business is to be a sort of wild man with an orderly style in an orderly society. I think that kind of economic freedom was what those before us worked hard to gain. Maybe birthdays will be generic, but it's easier to give a profitable business a personal flair than to make a personal business profitable.
- jplayer01 7y agoI don't see why the two should be at odds when it comes to how tractors should be designed. I feel like tractors that can be repaired on-site by your own employees is a far better deal than being 100% reliant on the manufacturer's good grace.
- magduf 7y agoIt IS a far better deal. Farmers should try only buying those, instead of throwing their money at a company that abuses them. The problem is that many farmers absolutely insist on buying only from John Deere, and then they complain about Deere's terrible policies and unrepairability. It reminds me of Apple customers who complain about their MacBooks not having normal USB ports or their iPhones being so locked-down. There are competitors out there...
- bg117 7y agoIt will lead to more wealth accumulation for a select few and again lead to income disparities.
- ossworkerrights 7y ago"The family farmer is going extinct." This is a pretty sad state of affairs. I feel like this is true for other industries as well, including tech. Corporate socialism appears to be eating all forms of free enterprise and while it has some benefits such as scale products, it has far too many drawbacks such as less freedom.
- titzer 7y agoI'm from a long line of farmers. My dad was born and raised on a farm and went off to business school in the 1960s, had a career in business and (tried to) return to farming in the mid 1980s. By then the corporatization of farming had already begun and was in full swing. Economics was constantly demanding larger and larger economies of scale. The "paltry" 200 acres of my grandmother's farm wasn't sufficient, nor was the second farm my father bought. It was impossible to afford a combine for a farm that small. He ended up paying the neighboring farm (1000+ acres) to do the harvest for him, cutting his margins even lower. He got out of farming by the 1990s and went into day trading. > The world changes and sometimes it sucks but that is how progress is made. It isn't progress. It's mechanization. Mechanization demanded by economics. Our food is lower quality (especially fruits and vegetables) and full of pesticides and antibiotics, the ground water and soil are depleted. With the ease of global shipping, farmers compete on a global market which amplifies competition even more. And if people in Timbuktu don't like the taste of my apples, who cares. But hey, food is cheap, ubiquitous and fewer people have to be farmers. But what that really means is bigger profits for fewer people, more environmental overhead, and throwing lots of people out of a line of work that stretches back literally ten thousand years.