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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 wh

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).
  - Retric 2y ago
    > 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 That’s just wildly wrong by several orders of magnitude, to the point I question your judgment to even consider it a valid possibility. Not only would the price be inherently much higher but if everyone including infants working 50 hours per week we’d still would produce less than 1/30th the current world’s output of oil and going back we’ve been extracting oil at industrial scale for over 100 years. To get even close to those numbers you’d need to assume 100% of human labor going back into prehistory was devoted purely to oil extraction.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      What are you claiming is widely wrong exactly? The estimate of comparison between the amount of energy in a barrel of oil and the average amount of energy a human can produce in an hour?
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        You were comparing amount of energy between human labor and a barrel of oil? That's such a baffling metric that neither they nor I realized that's what you meant. It's not like you can replace a human with a solar panel, but if you could that would be astoundingly impressive and not diminished toward "horribly unproductive" by the fact that the solar panel is delivering more watts to do the same thing.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        I'm not sure where that confusion lies. The earlier comment or was talking about the massive reduction in the amount of human labor required to cultivate land and the relative productivity of the land. That comparison comes down to amount of work done. Whether that work is done by a human swinging a scythe or a human driving a diesel powered tractor is irrelevant, the work is measured in joules at the end of the day. We have drastically fewer human hours put into farm labor because we found a massive multiplier effect in fossil fuel energy. I'm not sure where solar panels came in, but sure they can also be used to store watts and produce joules of work if that's your preferred source of energy.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        The confusion lies in why we would measure the efficiency of human labor in joules per unit of work instead of hours of human effort per unit of work. In particular, if we can make a machine that spends more joules than a human, but reduces the human effort by orders of magnitude, why would that be "horribly unproductive"? Most people would call that amazingly productive. And when they want to broaden the view to consider the inputs too, they're worried about the labor that goes into the inputs, not the joules. (And if the worry is the limited amount of fossil fuels in particular, we can do the same with renewable energy.)
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    > pounds of food say little about the nutritional value to consumers Nah, it's not 100% but it says a lot about the nutritional value. > inputs You can approximate those with price. A barrel of oil might be a couple hours.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      A couple hours of what? We can do drastically more work with a barrel of oil compared to a couple hours of human labor.
      - Retric 2y ago
        You really can’t. Human labor is productive, a barrel of oil on its own isn’t going to accomplish crap. You likely get less useful work out of a gallon of gas in your car than it took to extract, refine, transport, and distribute that gallon of gas. Just as an example gas pumps use electricity that isn’t coming from oil.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        Sure, of course there are a lot of losses along the way going from crude in the ground to gas in your car's tank. This whole thread was about productivity in terms of hours spent by the last person in the chain, the farmer. They can do drastically more today in terms of food production because they can leverage the potential energy in oil to replace human labor, and in that metric all of the externalized costs are ignored.
        Retric 2y ago
        > because they can leverage the potential energy in oil to replace human labor Nope, what’s being replaced is animal feed used for animal labor. People didn’t pull a plow by hand and then suddenly swap to tractors. For thousands of years farmers used sunlight > animal feed > domesticated animals, there’s nothing special about oil here. Track the in oil energy for a tractor vs the sunlight to grow plants to feed a pair of horses and the tractor is using wildly less energy per year to get vastly more done. You can even make it more obvious by using solar panels in the same fields feeding horses 100 years ago to charge an electric tractor. Oil is cheap, but not necessary there was even wood and coal burning tractors in the early days. PS: Horses can apparently digest the cellulose in sawdust from several types of trees. It’s unhealthy in large quantities but kind of an interesting fact.

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).
- Retric 2y ago
  > 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 That’s just wildly wrong by several orders of magnitude, to the point I question your judgment to even consider it a valid possibility. Not only would the price be inherently much higher but if everyone including infants working 50 hours per week we’d still would produce less than 1/30th the current world’s output of oil and going back we’ve been extracting oil at industrial scale for over 100 years. To get even close to those numbers you’d need to assume 100% of human labor going back into prehistory was devoted purely to oil extraction.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    What are you claiming is widely wrong exactly? The estimate of comparison between the amount of energy in a barrel of oil and the average amount of energy a human can produce in an hour?
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      You were comparing amount of energy between human labor and a barrel of oil? That's such a baffling metric that neither they nor I realized that's what you meant. It's not like you can replace a human with a solar panel, but if you could that would be astoundingly impressive and not diminished toward "horribly unproductive" by the fact that the solar panel is delivering more watts to do the same thing.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        I'm not sure where that confusion lies. The earlier comment or was talking about the massive reduction in the amount of human labor required to cultivate land and the relative productivity of the land. That comparison comes down to amount of work done. Whether that work is done by a human swinging a scythe or a human driving a diesel powered tractor is irrelevant, the work is measured in joules at the end of the day. We have drastically fewer human hours put into farm labor because we found a massive multiplier effect in fossil fuel energy. I'm not sure where solar panels came in, but sure they can also be used to store watts and produce joules of work if that's your preferred source of energy.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        The confusion lies in why we would measure the efficiency of human labor in joules per unit of work instead of hours of human effort per unit of work. In particular, if we can make a machine that spends more joules than a human, but reduces the human effort by orders of magnitude, why would that be "horribly unproductive"? Most people would call that amazingly productive. And when they want to broaden the view to consider the inputs too, they're worried about the labor that goes into the inputs, not the joules. (And if the worry is the limited amount of fossil fuels in particular, we can do the same with renewable energy.)
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  > pounds of food say little about the nutritional value to consumers Nah, it's not 100% but it says a lot about the nutritional value. > inputs You can approximate those with price. A barrel of oil might be a couple hours.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    A couple hours of what? We can do drastically more work with a barrel of oil compared to a couple hours of human labor.
    - Retric 2y ago
      You really can’t. Human labor is productive, a barrel of oil on its own isn’t going to accomplish crap. You likely get less useful work out of a gallon of gas in your car than it took to extract, refine, transport, and distribute that gallon of gas. Just as an example gas pumps use electricity that isn’t coming from oil.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        Sure, of course there are a lot of losses along the way going from crude in the ground to gas in your car's tank. This whole thread was about productivity in terms of hours spent by the last person in the chain, the farmer. They can do drastically more today in terms of food production because they can leverage the potential energy in oil to replace human labor, and in that metric all of the externalized costs are ignored.
        Retric 2y ago
        > because they can leverage the potential energy in oil to replace human labor Nope, what’s being replaced is animal feed used for animal labor. People didn’t pull a plow by hand and then suddenly swap to tractors. For thousands of years farmers used sunlight > animal feed > domesticated animals, there’s nothing special about oil here. Track the in oil energy for a tractor vs the sunlight to grow plants to feed a pair of horses and the tractor is using wildly less energy per year to get vastly more done. You can even make it more obvious by using solar panels in the same fields feeding horses 100 years ago to charge an electric tractor. Oil is cheap, but not necessary there was even wood and coal burning tractors in the early days. PS: Horses can apparently digest the cellulose in sawdust from several types of trees. It’s unhealthy in large quantities but kind of an interesting fact.