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Ghost of Mussolini posted:Another important point to keep in mind when discussing agriculture is that in the developed and the richer end (Southern Cone, Eastern Europe) of developing economies people who work in agriculture are old as gently caress. I'm talking about averages that are constantly getting closer to the retirement age, I believe in the USA the figure is 59 years old. I can only talk about Australia here, but we have a similar average farmer age and this statistic gets thrown around a lot by people trying to draw attention to the perceived crisis of young people avoiding agriculture. While it is correct, it misses a lot of the detail. The average age of farmers is skewed by older farmers staying on the land without much actual productive agricultural activity going on, and the productive farms tend to be very large and with few employees. So the average age of a farmer might be 59, but if you weight it by the amount they produce then that goes right down.
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Dec 21, 2014 02:38
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I think other things skewing the numbers are the fact that the population as a whole is getting older and there just aren't as many people needed to grow food now as there were in the past. It was actually very, very recently in history that most humans were still farmers. Now comparatively few of us are. Fewer people are going into agriculture because fewer people are needed. This is also true. The amount of work one person can do with modern machinery is staggering compared to manual production techniques. There's not much room in the industry for the stereotypical smallholder now, and without considerable government intervention that's unlikely to change. I don't think they'll disappear entirely though. A lot of people in rich countries actually like farming and are willing to self-subsidise their operations with off-farm income. open24hours fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 06:02
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Forgall posted:What about hydroponics? Are there serious downsides to them? Are they good for growing stuff other than lettuce, like legumes so we could get some protein out of them? Using 1% of water and being able to easily filter out all useful stuff from runoff and reuse it seems pretty great. And they are basically independent of climate. Hydroponics work well for some types of crops. With advances in solar power, and the ability to desalinate water on a small scale relatively cheaply, it's entirely possible we'll see a proliferation of hydroponic activity, especially in very dry areas. At the moment i don't think building them on a scale to grow crops like wheat, rice, potatoes, corn, etc is really viable though.
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Dec 22, 2014 13:37
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