Centerfield

After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates

Peter Magnusson has pointed out that farming has stopped being the biggest category of job people on the planet do ( slashdot thread). It's because people have been slowly getting more and more efficient at growing things. Fewer and fewer people or acres are needed to make more and more food. Yes, acres are being retired every year from farming, considerably raising the amount of unused land in the US. I haven't checked global stats to see if farming retirement exceeds greater usage from population growth worldwide.

This certainly doesn't mean there's danger of not having enough farmers to grow things. No, efficiency will continue to rise. If a crisis of some sort arises, we'll see prices rise enough to tempt people and ex-farmland back to work.

As recently as 200 years ago, a smart man, one Jefferson, couldn't imagine the United States ever going mostly industrial, much less beyond that.

Progress has been decidedly uneven - the US employs 1/20th (OK, that's probably wrong because of illegal immigration, but even with that it's a small %age) of its workforce to make a huge and pretty varied food surplus, while the world as a whole needs 36% of its labor force to make decidedly less good meals for most of itself.

One reason for this is that there are more and more jobs, especially in the advanced democracies, that make farming look bad-paying and with terribly hard labor conditions - long hours and terrible uncertainty. They pay better because they make higher-value things like computers, software, and movies. There's more overall money/person in services (software and movies are counted as servies) than in industry, and more per person in industry than in farming. Of course, it's not quite that simple - there are plenty of people making more money in farming than in cold-calling services, for example.

And, alas, World Hunger is still very much with us. There is no sign of distribution becoming COMPLETELY global, nor of grinding poverty vanishing (though both problems are diminishing).