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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

In 1850, 70% of American jobs were farming. Eighty years later, it was 25%. Half of America's jobs vanished in one lifetime.

This trend has been hard on farmers; I happen to know several. But I don't think we want to return to that time.

Nor do I think basic income/farm subsidies is a good answer.

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You know what, we've not really walked away unscathed after the transition to modern agricultural approaches just yet.

The environmental cost of modern agricultural approaches is very high and is having knock on effects, food quality isn't always of the highest nutritional quality and crops will suffer as dead humus from petro-chemical based fertiliser retains no water, more water means higher food costs as it grows more scarce due to climate change and over population.

Maybe it wouldn't hurt society if a few more "skilled farmers" worked with/closer to the land.

Yea, no. Food quality and quantity is higher than ever. Our world is also awash in water, the fact that California gifted control of its water supplies to opportunists a hundred years ago not withstanding. There is no water supply problem that cannot be solved by finally applying free markets.

Especially when you consider irrigation water.

In my ruralish community, irrigation water is less than 1/10 the price of potable water, because it is so much easier to produce.

>There is no water supply problem that cannot be solved by finally applying free markets.

Do civil wars[1] count as "free markets"?

[1] - http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241

Many people left viable farms for better opportunities in industrial jobs though, rather than getting laid off from their farms.

My great-grandparents were homesteading in the 1900s.

My grandfather was still using some horse drawn equipment in the 1940s-1950s, to farm on maybe 110 acres.

So the barriers to farming for survival didn't go up very fast.

The US's population grew from approximately 25mil to 110mil in that window. Was that taken into account?

Yes. That's why it's percentages.

Bigger populations always require more food, child care, accountants, etc.

From 1840 to 1920 farmers per-capita shrunk immensely.

Can you expand on why you don't see basic income as a solution?

You know farmers who worked on farms in the 1920s?

No, I know farmers who worked on farms since the 70s.

The trend didn't stop in 1920. It's necessarily slowed in absolute workforce percentages of course, but even now agriculture is becoming increasingly mechanized (requiring massive capital investment).

Shouldn't it be: Half of the US's _farming_ jobs vanished in one lifetime?

That's not how I read it. 70% of total jobs were farming jobs. Then it was 25% of total jobs. Meaning, 45% of total jobs disappeared.

Of course, they were mostly replaced by other jobs. But the jobs still disappeared.

[Assuming the number of jobs is constant]

[edit] Apparently the population grew massively over this period. From about 23 million to about 123 million. So there was actually an overall doubling of the total number of farming jobs. Just not proportionate to the population increase. http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h980.html

You'd expect the amount of work done on farms to increase in line with the population, simply because the population has to be fed. Any comparison should take that into account. The number of farming jobs per capita has declined drastically as a result of mechanization.

Right. More people => more food.

But some combination of "keep farming like I always have" or "grow up keeping farming like Dad" wasn't supported by economic realities.

(FYI, farming automation was much of the reason the population was able to grow by that much.)

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