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Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers. We are currently a long way from that kind of change as cu

by Retric 2y ago

Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers. We are currently a long way from that kind of change as current AI tools suck by comparison to literally 1,000x increases in productivity. So, in well under 100 years programming could become extremely niche.

quantumHazer 2y ago
> Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers. Yes, but. There are more jobs in other fields that are adjacent to food production, particularly in distribution. Middle class does not existed and retail workers are now a large percentage of workers in most parts of the world.
- Retric 2y ago
  Sure, but when farmers where 90% of the labor force many of the remaining 10% also related to food distribution and production, a village blacksmith was mostly in support of farming, salt production/transport for food storage, etc. Food is just a smaller percentage of the economy overall.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Was there ever a time when 90% of labor was in farming and we had anything resembling an economy? I would have assumed that if 90% of people are farming its largely subsistence and any trade or happened on a much more local scale, potentially without any proper currency involved.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Globally perhaps not as fishing and hunting have been major food sources in antiquity especially when you include North America etc. Similarly slavery meant a significant portion of the population was in effect outside the economy. That said, there’s been areas where 90% of the working population was at minimum helping with the harvest up until the Middle Ages.
_heimdall 2y ago
We are seeing an interesting limit in the food case though. We increased production and needed fewer farmers, but we now have so few farmers that most people have very little idea of what food really is, where it comes from, or what it takes to run our food system. Higher productivity is good to a point, but eventually it risks becoming too fragile.
- master_crab 2y ago
  100%. In fact, this exact scenario is playing out in the cattle industry. Screwworm, a parasite that kills cattle in days is making a comeback. And we are less prepared for it this time because previously (the 1950s-1970s) we had a lot more labor in the industry to manually check each head of cattle. Bloomberg even called it out specifically. Ranchers also said the screwworm would be much deadlier if it were to return, because of a lack of labor. “We can’t fight it like we did in the ’60s, we can’t go out and rope every head of cattle and put a smear on every open wound,” Schumann said. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-02/deadly-screwworm-parasite-s-comeback-threatens-texas-cattle-us-beef-supply?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=copy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-02/deadly-sc...
  - senordevnyc 2y ago
    This sounds like the kind of labor problem that could quickly be solved by hiring more people. So really the worst case here is that beef will cost a little more for a little while. Hardly an existential threat.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Who will they hire though? Cattle operations are often in very rural areas, and we are putting up huge blockers for immigrants and migrant workers.
      - chii 2y ago
        you're conflating a political issue with a problem having zero possible solutions. A stroke of the pen will fix any and all political issues, if/when the political desire comes about. Vs a problem with no solution - no pen will fix any of it, regardless of political will.
anticensor 2y ago
Did you type in an additional zero there?
- Retric 2y ago
  Nope, where a family might struggle to efficiently manage 50 acres under continuous cultivation even just a few hundred years ago, now it’s not uncommon to see single family farms with 20,000 acres each of which is several times more productive. It’s somewhat arbitrary where you draw the line historically but it’s not just maximum productivity worth remembering crops used to fail from drought etc far more frequently. Small hobby farms are also a thing these days, but that’s a separate issue.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    For those 20,000 acre farms, by what measure are they more productive? In my experience they're very productive by poundage yield, but horribly unproductive when it comes to inputs required, chemicals used, biodiversity, soil health, etc.
    - Retric 2y ago
      We’re looking at hours of labor per lb of food. The difference is so extreme vs historic methods you can skip pesticides, avoid harming soil health or biodiversity vs traditional methods etc without any issues here and still be talking 1,000x. Though really growing crops for human consumption is something of a rounding error here. It’s livestock, biofuels, cotton, organic plastics, wood, flowers, etc that’s consuming the vast majority of output from farms.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        If that's the metric, sure we have gotten very good at producing more pounds of food per human hour of labor. Two things worth noting though, pounds of food say little about the nutritional value to consumers. I don't have hood links handy so I won't make any specific claims, just worth considering if weight is the right metric. As far as human labor hours goes, we've gotten very good at outsourcing those costs. Farm labor hours ignores all the hours put in to their off-farm inputs (machinery, pesticides and fertilizers, seed production, etc). We also leverage an astronomical amount of (mostly) diesel fuel to power all of it. The human labor hours are small, but I've seen estimates of a single barrel of oil being comparable to 25,000 hours of human labor or 12.5 years of full employment. I'd be interested to do the math now, but I expect we have seen a fraction of that 25,000x multiplier materialize in the reduction of farm hours worked over the last century (or back to the industrial revolution).

by Retric 2y ago

quantumHazer 2y ago

> Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers. Yes, but. There are more jobs in other fields that are adjacent to food production, particularly in distribution. Middle class does not existed and retail workers are now a large percentage of workers in most parts of the world.

Retric 2y ago
Sure, but when farmers where 90% of the labor force many of the remaining 10% also related to food distribution and production, a village blacksmith was mostly in support of farming, salt production/transport for food storage, etc. Food is just a smaller percentage of the economy overall.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Was there ever a time when 90% of labor was in farming and we had anything resembling an economy? I would have assumed that if 90% of people are farming its largely subsistence and any trade or happened on a much more local scale, potentially without any proper currency involved.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Globally perhaps not as fishing and hunting have been major food sources in antiquity especially when you include North America etc. Similarly slavery meant a significant portion of the population was in effect outside the economy. That said, there’s been areas where 90% of the working population was at minimum helping with the harvest up until the Middle Ages.

_heimdall 2y ago

We are seeing an interesting limit in the food case though. We increased production and needed fewer farmers, but we now have so few farmers that most people have very little idea of what food really is, where it comes from, or what it takes to run our food system. Higher productivity is good to a point, but eventually it risks becoming too fragile.

master_crab 2y ago
100%. In fact, this exact scenario is playing out in the cattle industry. Screwworm, a parasite that kills cattle in days is making a comeback. And we are less prepared for it this time because previously (the 1950s-1970s) we had a lot more labor in the industry to manually check each head of cattle. Bloomberg even called it out specifically. Ranchers also said the screwworm would be much deadlier if it were to return, because of a lack of labor. “We can’t fight it like we did in the ’60s, we can’t go out and rope every head of cattle and put a smear on every open wound,” Schumann said. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-02/deadly-screwworm-parasite-s-comeback-threatens-texas-cattle-us-beef-supply?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=copy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-02/deadly-sc...
- senordevnyc 2y ago
  This sounds like the kind of labor problem that could quickly be solved by hiring more people. So really the worst case here is that beef will cost a little more for a little while. Hardly an existential threat.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Who will they hire though? Cattle operations are often in very rural areas, and we are putting up huge blockers for immigrants and migrant workers.
    - chii 2y ago
      you're conflating a political issue with a problem having zero possible solutions. A stroke of the pen will fix any and all political issues, if/when the political desire comes about. Vs a problem with no solution - no pen will fix any of it, regardless of political will.

anticensor 2y ago

Did you type in an additional zero there?

Retric 2y ago
Nope, where a family might struggle to efficiently manage 50 acres under continuous cultivation even just a few hundred years ago, now it’s not uncommon to see single family farms with 20,000 acres each of which is several times more productive. It’s somewhat arbitrary where you draw the line historically but it’s not just maximum productivity worth remembering crops used to fail from drought etc far more frequently. Small hobby farms are also a thing these days, but that’s a separate issue.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  For those 20,000 acre farms, by what measure are they more productive? In my experience they're very productive by poundage yield, but horribly unproductive when it comes to inputs required, chemicals used, biodiversity, soil health, etc.
  - Retric 2y ago
    We’re looking at hours of labor per lb of food. The difference is so extreme vs historic methods you can skip pesticides, avoid harming soil health or biodiversity vs traditional methods etc without any issues here and still be talking 1,000x. Though really growing crops for human consumption is something of a rounding error here. It’s livestock, biofuels, cotton, organic plastics, wood, flowers, etc that’s consuming the vast majority of output from farms.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      If that's the metric, sure we have gotten very good at producing more pounds of food per human hour of labor. Two things worth noting though, pounds of food say little about the nutritional value to consumers. I don't have hood links handy so I won't make any specific claims, just worth considering if weight is the right metric. As far as human labor hours goes, we've gotten very good at outsourcing those costs. Farm labor hours ignores all the hours put in to their off-farm inputs (machinery, pesticides and fertilizers, seed production, etc). We also leverage an astronomical amount of (mostly) diesel fuel to power all of it. The human labor hours are small, but I've seen estimates of a single barrel of oil being comparable to 25,000 hours of human labor or 12.5 years of full employment. I'd be interested to do the math now, but I expect we have seen a fraction of that 25,000x multiplier materialize in the reduction of farm hours worked over the last century (or back to the industrial revolution).