As promised, this week’s piece is about agriculture.
If you ask someone for the definition of a job embedded in the ‘old economy’ they will inevitably blurt out ‘farming.’ Which makes sense right? It’s a rural profession that’s been around since some dude in Mesopotamia tossed seeds on the ground and decided to pitch his tent nearby. Furthermore, most families have some sort of ‘leaving the farm’ story where the bright scrappy child went off to the ‘big city’ to make a name for themselves. We can all think of the ‘Migrant Mother’ portrait from the Great Depression (shown below) and think ‘yeah, that’s some down-on-the-farm poverty right there.’
Agriculture is supposed to have been this thing we outgrew. Or at least we don’t tell the youths of society to pursue it as a line of work. To be fair, that narrative has made sense over the last 120 years. The standard line is that something like 96% of farm jobs have been automated away in the United States since 1900 with a 2/3rds decline from 1950 to 2000.1
However, in case you have not noticed, everyone still eats. It is also the case that most foodstuffs are grown on the same continent that they are consumed. Sure Saskatchewan wheat ends up in Algeria and bananas are shipped up north from South America but for the most part, food isn’t that big of an import/export product in the same way that every manufactured good I buy at Wal-Mart comes from South East Asia. My corn comes from a valley down the highway, my flour is from the Great Plains, and my strawberries come from California.
The fact of the matter is that today there are 6 billion more people on Earth than in 1900, we eat more per person, and both of these factors – population and caloric intake – are going to keep trending upwards.
The question then is how the hell is agriculture not seen as a growth industry when it is the raw material required for our literal growth?
Allow me to approach this from a slightly different angle. The late sociologist David Graeber had a book called Bullshit Jobs. It’s a decent read and I recommend it. Anyways, in it Graeber provides a test as to whether or not your job is a bullshit job: If you disappeared tomorrow from the face of the earth and no one stepped in to fill the gap would anyone’s life outside of your immediate work group me affected in an adverse manner? If the answer is no then you have a bullshit job. An easier way to think about it is whether or not life goes on for more than a month without your entire profession. Accountants, investment bankers, lobbyists, and hedge fund bros, all are expendable. Meanwhile, if agricultural workers disappear as a production cohort, we would all starve to death.
So, how about we spend some time looking at the folks down on the farm and then look at some factors shaping our perceptions of the future with agriculture as a controlling factor?
There are three primary forms of innovation in agriculture: mechanical, chemical, and biological. Most of us are familiar, to one extent or another, with the mechanical side of things. The classic example is the tractor which was “one of the most revolutionary technological innovations in the history of agriculture.”2 Yet, the tractor is just one form of machinery that has transformed agriculture.
Take, for example, the plough and the reaper. The plow allowed for the utilization of draft animals in farming as opposed to humans with shovels and hoes. A plough driven by horses or oxen can go longer, deeper, and farther than a small brigade of men with metal instruments. Meanwhile, the animal-driven reaper eliminated the quintessential peasant activity of scything. Once gasoline and diesel came to play in agriculture the rates of production were no longer stymied by the blood and sinews of animals.
From 1800 to 2021 the human labor required to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than 2 seconds.3 This 300-times increase in human productivity eliminated the need for large agricultural workforces while also supplying more food, more readily, for more people as fossil fuel-powered equipment worked increasing swaths of land that would have been unproductive if cultivated solely by human and animal power. It is no wonder – in part – that the global population took off like a rocket when – all else being equal – we were able to simply feed more people.
Additionally, the automotive revolution in farming led to there being more land available for cultivation outside of technical limitation considerations. It is not just that tractors et al., can farm the same land more quickly, it’s that the implementation of automotive agriculture freed up a large swath of land for the purposes of human consumption rather than that of animals. The thing about horses and oxen is that they have to be fed. Instead of pumping WTI out of the earth to fuel a machine, you have to get food down an animal’s throat. To that end “about one-quarter of all American farmland [was] devoted to growing fodder for draft animals” prior to automation.4 Swapping to machine power – all else being equal – boosted available human calories by a third.
One has to note though that farm automation was not some sort of miracle process. Instead, it was largely a substitution process vis-à-vis energy sources. Ignoring human labor, it is simple enough to say that animal power requires food. This food must come from land that would otherwise be available for the growing of human-consumed food. By contrast, engines require petroleum products that are derived from sub-surface sources. You can have a farm above an oil and gas reserve. In fact, that’s the entire rural economy of places like Alberta. Petroleum allowed for the higher energy density inputs that begat more production.
The acknowledgment of the role of petroleum in agriculture is important but it’s actually significantly larger than just aiding in machine propulsion. As Vaclav Smil puts it:
“The energy required to make and power farm machinery is dwarfed by the energy requirements of producing agrochemicals. Modern farming requires fungicides and insecticides to minimize crop losses, and herbicides to prevent weeds from competing for the available plant nutrients and water. All of these are highly energy intensive products...”5
On top of agrochemicals, you also have the role of natural gas in powering the Haber Bosch method of creating ammonia used in fertilizer.
All told, much of modern agriculture is the product of energy subsidies provided by fossil fuels. By subsidies, I am referring to the fact that farmland – with its attendant sunshine and rain – is unable to provide enough food to feed the planet on its own. Instead, we are required to add energy to the plot of land via fossil fuels. Think of agriculture as one of Vin Diesel’s rides in The Fast and The Furious franchise with fossil fuels providing the nitro boost needed to evade authorities. In this analogy, the authorities stand for mass starvation. Sure, the car can run without the boost, but you need it in order to evade the binary of dead or alive.
It is not just a little bit of a boost either. In fact, modern agriculture underwent a “90-fold” increase in energy subsidies from 1900 to 2000.6 One does not simply compensate for a 9000% growth in input intensity overnight.
A recurring theme one sees in popular literature is that contemporary agriculture is wasteful in terms of energy and other inputs. Typically some jackass holds up greenhouses and vertical farms as more efficient and effective ways of growing things. Yet, things are not that simple given that, for example, “greenhouse tomatoes are among the world’s most heavily fertilized crops: per unit area they receive 10 times as much nitrogen (and also phosphorous) as is used to produce grain corn.”7 To put that into context, if you are a typical consumer in Scandinavia, your tomatoes probably come from Spain or North Africa and carry with them an energy subsidy equivalent to 5 tablespoons of diesel per tomato.8
The problem here is that tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and the whole gang are – despite their commodification – luxury goods in the grand scheme of things. Just think about it. A tomato is bright red, fragile, and rots moderately easily. It has to be kept cool once picked and ship carefully. There is a reason why these items were seasonal luxuries in past generations.
The only thing allowing us to have such vibrant fruits and vegetables is the level of energy inputs with force into the system. Despite what proponents of Controlled Environment Agriculture say, “greenhouses [let alone vertical farming dumpster palaces] may be profitable for some high-price products, such as flowers our out-of-season vegetables, but it would be economically insane and environmentally devastating to extend it to staple crops.”9
Pivoting away from energy inputs for a little bit, we can also see biological innovation as a large driver of agricultural output increases. The traditional narrative around biological innovation is that it occurred sequentially relative to its mechanical counterpart. Basically, the idea is that first we got tractors then we started the genetic engineering that begat the ‘Green Revolution.’ Evidence for this line of thinking usually takes the form of things such as the per hectare yield of wheat in America going from 15 to above 30 bushels between 1940 and 1970. However, this narrative is misleading.
Staying just with American wheat here, “the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a stream of biological innovations in the wheat (and small grains) sector that rivaled the importance of mechanical changes for agricultural productivity growth.”10 Simply put, wheat is not a monoculture across North America. Varieties that work in Massachusetts do not work in Oklahoma, North Dakota, or Utah. Hence biological innovation was required – through breeding programs and importation of foreign seeds – to expand cultivatable acres. For example, “Red Fife was the first hard spring wheat grown in North America [beginning in the mid-1800s] and became the basis for the spread of the wheat frontier into Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Canada.”11
Biological innovation allowed for shorter stalks of wheat (i.e. less wasted energy on non-edible components) but also heartier varieties that fit into both drier and colder climates. For example, by 1969 experimentation had led to an environment where there were “11 varieties of hard red winter wheat” alone growing “on 1-million or more acres.”12
Such levels of biological innovation are equally valid across crops ranging from corn and cotton through to tobacco. Traditional biological innovation was less interested in boosting yield per acre per se than in expanding the frontier of cultivatable land. Therefore, one has a situation where more food was grown in aggregate because of the increase in the amount of land under cultivation. In the American – and Canadian examples – once the continent was more or less saturated with farmland, you could begin to explore ways to boost yields per acre. But first, you had to have crops on the land since clearing new land and finding/breeding roughly appropriate varieties took up fewer resources (higher ROI in a near-term horizon) than genetic engineering. Once the Green Revolution came though, the rising tide began to lift all boats – if you would.
The fact of the matter is that while someone may moan about the likes of a Bayer Crop Science (formerly Monsanto) and their GMOs, it is simply the case that without the yield benefits brought about by genetic engineering, we’d have a lot fewer people hanging around with a lot less meat on their bones.
This brings us to factors related to the future of agriculture. From my point of view, the factors of relevance are demographics and geography.
It is basically impossible to imagine a world with fewer people in the foreseeable future. The UN projects around 11 billion of us shitheads by 2100.13 Now, there are going to be declines in certain societies such as Japan, China, Russia, and most of eastern Europe – if not the entire continent. Maybe some of those societies will turn it around, but I don’t know. Nothing about contemporary Russian men leads me to believe that they are suddenly going to turn that country into a veritable stud farm. There is simply an inverse correlation between Adidas tracksuit usage and virility.
At the same time, we are going to see more and more people living in cities and not working in the fields. This means that society will be further and further removed from the realities of feeding ourselves. A disconnectedness from the reality of modern survival means that we become increasingly susceptible to bullshit ideas around agricultural production. Sure, wealthier people in affluent countries want to consume all-natural (whatever the hell that means) organic foods and eliminate – or severely reduce – the consumption of meat. However, the widespread adoption of such methods is the public policy equivalent of Lord Farquaad saying, “some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
The blunt reality of a return to a ‘more natural’ agricultural system is that “even if [we] were willing to empty the cities and embrace organic earthiness, [we] could still produce only enough food to sustain less than half of today’s global population.”14 I might be too harsh a man, but my take is that those who look around and believe there are too many people ought to be the first to make a self-contribution towards a more ‘sustainable’ body count.
As mentioned above, if we were to adopt a vegetarian diet it is not evident that we would, in turn, find ourselves materially better off from an environmental point of view. If a greenhouse tomato requires around 650ml of diesel equivalent per kilogram produced, a broiler chicken is roughly comparable at 200 to 1000ml needed per kilogram.15 Now, sure, chickens are the most efficient form of meat production so we could yeet the cows and pigs from our diet, but the fact is that meat provides a protein density not found in vegan and vegetarian food sources.
It is clear that if our collective population is going to continue to grow then the food supply ought to grow in a commensurate manner. Now, sure, savings are to be found in reducing food waste, but a 50% increase in global population by end of the century is going to need increased production relative to where we are today even if we were to preserve the 30-40% of food in affluent countries that is ‘wasted.’
On the environmental side, there are other considerations – primarily around fossil fuels. While it is imaginable that you could have electric farm equipment, it is not evident that such technologies are rapidly approaching performance akin to what is capable of internal combustion engines. Running the combine from dusk to dawn outside Estevan, Saskatchewan is a tad bit different than ripping around Aspen in a Tesla. Especially if we consider the weight surplus that comes with batteries. Yet, as mentioned above agrochemicals and fertilizer play as large a role, if not larger, when it comes to energy spent on the farm.
Let’s just cut to the chase and note that there are no non-energy intensive agrochemicals in existence that perform at the level needed for modern agriculture. Additionally, as a society, we lack the ability to substitute non-fossil fuel energy for current energy needs. This is especially true with fertilizer where synthesis relies on the methane found in natural gas. Sure, maybe we could get the hydrogen from water via renewables or nuclear, but we are not exactly set up as a society for that to occur at any scale. Thus, unless we’re all going to dive into a crash diet here in the name of ‘sustainability’ fossil fuels will continue to drive our food chain.
As for geography, let’s circle back around to my comments that more and more of us are going to live in cities – far removed from agricultural production. There is a school of thought broadly encapsulated by the work of long-dead Canadian historian Harold Innis. Innis put forth what’s known as the Staples Thesis which postulates (particularly in the Canadian context) that economic resources shape the culture, politics, and geography of a given region/political entity. In the example of Canada, you could look at something like the fur trade and see that settlements along the great river and lake systems were not pre-ordained but rather the result of economic resource-related activities. Furthermore, the railroads (with their attendant towns and cities) in Canada – largely the product of pre-1950 development – follow the contours of coal, metals, and grain resource areas.
Another Canadian example would be that of the city of Montreal. Montreal was effectively the major Canadian export hub for a few hundred years as trade went east-west between Canada and Europe. Once trade shifted to north-south with the United States and the Saint Lawrence Seaway connected the great lakes region to the broader world Montreal no longer sucked a continent’s worth of resources its way. On top of this economic shift came a growth in Quebec nationalism and the demise of the anglophone component of the city’s population which contributed to major corporations – especially banks and insurance companies – fleeing for Toronto which became the nation’s largest city in the 1980s. Today, if you go to Montreal you still get the sense of past grandeur but frankly, the place is a shithole with a superiority complex. The best analogy I can think of is that Montreal is just a colder French version of Philadelphia.
Anyways, the Staples Thesis implies that economics shapes politics, geography, and infrastructure. Increasingly people move to cities because they put forth promises of economic returns greater than what is available in rural areas. The result is that polities begin to reflect urban mindsets, priorities, and notions. City dwellers are largely divorced from the ‘real’ economy consisting of commodities such as fossil fuels and agriculture. The Staples in the modern economy are things like services and tech. Politics, development, and public policy, therefore, favor these seemingly hot sectors of the economy. The problem is that these sectors are not overly familiar with the facts of life. Groceries just appear in stores. Steel condo towers rise as though sprouting forth from the ground.
It should therefore come as no surprise that an increasingly urban population would favor policies that benefit them and align with their sensibilities. If folks in Houston, New York, or London are concerned about climate change, it does not immediately appear to them how a rapid decrease in fossil fuel production would hit their livelihoods and standards of living.
We too often take it as given that the economy is ‘dematerializing’ while at the same time we are consuming more and more shit. This is the paradox of contemporary life, we are less in touch with the materials that make modern life possible yet rely on them more and more.
I refer to this phenomenon as economic blindness. We simply cannot see what it takes to live the lives that we have. We just assume that certain sectors are outdated, backward, and unimportant. Yet, you cannot order a $24 salad without somebody somewhere growing the produce and providing the energy subsidies required to do so. This is why agriculture is vastly more important than any other industry. If we eliminated fossil fuels overnight then most of us would die but those left over would still have to eat.
You and I cannot eat consulting services. In that vein, if everyone at McKinsey dropped dead tomorrow no one would notice except for airline frequent flyer program managers. Yet, our best and brightest spend years trying to break into finance and consulting while the industry that actually makes the world go round is good old agriculture. It is this disparity in public policy and mindset that bothers me the most and is likely the greatest risk we run as a society.
End Notes:
Just finished: Feeding the World by Giovanni Federico
Currently Reading: The European Guilds by Sheilagh Ogilvie
Up Next: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/
Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 11.
Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going. New York: Viking, 2022, 51.
Ibid, 50.
Ibid, 52.
Ibid, 64.
Ibid, 60-61
Ibid, 61.
Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World: An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800-2000. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 13.
Creating Abundance, 17.
Ibid, 27.
Ibid, 63.
https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Line/900
How the World Really Works, 66.
Ibid, 58.