From How the World Really Works (Vaclav Siml, 2022) p66
Could we return to purely organic cropping, relying on recycled organic waste, and natural pest controls, and could we do without engine-powered irrigation and without field machinery by bringing back draft animals? We could, but purely organic farming would require most of us to abandon cities, resettle villages, dismantle central animal feeding operations, and bring all animals back to farms to use them for labor and as sources of manure. Every day we would have to feed and water our animals, regularly remove their manure, ferment it and then spread it on fields, and tend the herds and flocks on pasture. As seasonal labor demands rose and ebbed, men would guide the plows harnessed to teams of horses; women and children would plant and weed vegetable plots; and everybody would be pitching in during harvest and slaughter time, stooking sheaves of wheat, digging up potatoes, helping to turn freshly slaughtered pigs and geese into food. I do not foresee the organic green online commentariat embracing these options anytime soon. And even if they were willing to empty the cities and embrace organic earthiness, they could still produce only enough food to sustain less than half of today’s global population.
The numbers to confirm all of the above are not difficult to marshal. The decline of human labor required to produce American wheat outlined earlier in this chapter is an excellent proxy for the overall impact that mechanization and agrochemicals have had on the size of the country’s agricultural labor force. Between 1800 and 2020, we reduced the labor needed to produce a kilogram of grain by more than 98 percent — and we reduced the share of the country’s population engaged in agriculture by the same large margin. This provides a useful guide to the profound economic transformations that would have to take place with any retreat of agricultural mechanization and reduction in the use of synthetic agrochemicals.
Tgk1946's Blog 