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It really depends on what you define as "usable". I am currently looking out of a window in the Bavarian Forest and see nice lush green meadows which would be p
by tfourb 4y ago
It really depends on what you define as "usable". I am currently looking out of a window in the Bavarian Forest and see nice lush green meadows which would be perfectly productive under many different types of crops, but which are mostly used as pasture and meadow for hay production, because the landscape is hilly, which isn't well suited to be farmed with the heavy equipment that has become standard in i.e. corn and wheat production. This type of heavy, industrialized equipment in turn has been a type of farming heavily supported and subsidized by current agricultural policies. You could change the incentives and bring a lot of the farmland currently considered "marginal" into crop production again.
- hcurtiss 4y agoYes, with humans working hoes. I do not call that progress.
- tfourb 4y agoCurrently less than 1% of the population in many industrialized countries are working in agriculture. That is laughably few people and there is no reason why it couldn't be a greater share of the population. Guess what: many people are actually enjoying this kind of work when it isn't presented in a context of total exploitation. And no, while agriculture certainly tends to be physically demanding, it is not unreasonably so, even when done at small scale and with smaller machines. Small scale agriculture has been mechanized to a large degree and mechanized solutions have even been developed for very sustainable approaches to agriculture like agroforestry and syntropic agriculture.
- imtringued 4y agoI would have expected comments about AI and robotics instead. If you can build terraces and farm them robotically, then you can reuse the technology on Mars.