Is Technological Progress Slowing? The Case of American Agriculture
mattsclancy.substack.com
mattsclancy.substack.com
The highlight for me is one of the last graphs showing a sharp deviation in private sector ag R&D and public sector R&D. Private sector agriculture corporations are dominated by legacy multinationals that are very much in the rent-seeking stage of their existence. Because of onerous regulations (that aren't necessarily wrong) it is difficult for start-ups to disrupt these legacy players.
However Ag3.0 (yes I am stealing a web3.0 reference) will change this dynamic significantly when this current 'chemical era' in worldwide agriculture burns itself out due to unsustainability. See website in bio for my thoughts.
ETA: The 'cheat code' used to get that insane efficiency on corn yields is well known and well understood. Single-cross hybrids. Once scientists/breeders perfected the seed production mechanism, we reap those insane gains in the early 1940s. It was a transcendent change and IMO needs to be analyzed through a different lens that the slow grind of mechanization improvements, fertility improvements, etc.
ETA2: this link has a graphic that shows a _different_ measure of efficiency, one that shows steady growth over the past ~50 years. https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-agriculture-has-and-does...
It may be that these products are taxes-by-another-name, as consumers either shell out more money for inferior solutions (ebikes, I guess), or, turn to the secondary market instead (for gas leafblowers, say).
After seeing what we did with recycling, I would not be so naive going forward, on the claims of environmentalists. (I still have yet to see the research on the electric car co2 implications of producing batteries and offloading co2 output to power plants, when compared to the incumbent solution)
- https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/does-electric-...
This numbers take into account that countries like Poland use coal to produce electricity. And even that is improving fast.
They have less space requirements, both in private and public investment, and require less energy to move.
They fit modern requirements for really expensive real estate and rental costs really well.
Overall, I'd expect the efficiencies of the technology to approach similar numbers to what they're replacing, but the businesses profiting off the technology's use will change. Maybe for the better for end customers, and maybe not, but there's disruption opportunities galore
Neither diversity nor soil was mentioned once in TFA.
Is yield the only relevant metric? What about quantity/impact of pesticides? Amount of fertilizer required? Sustainability of local communities? Negative externalities?
All of those things you mentioned are intangible at this point and are not incentivized. We need to restructure the incentives around farming away from a commodity perspective (yield) and more around quality (sustainability and all that good stuff).
I often say, don't make farmers out to be the bad guys anymore than airplanes, cars, ihpones, etc. that similarly don't price in externalities.
My goal is to accept this fact, and try to bring those sustainability qualities to the big guys instead of chopping the big guys up in 1,000 smaller players that _would_ care.
Sustainability only matters if they can make the mortgage payments this year.
Many sustainable practices require a learning curve and there is a high risk of losing yield if not done correctly.
I think many farmers and landowners _want_ to be sustainable, but the current state of economics makes it challenging except for the top x% of producers.
Short sighted practices only remain in the short run.
Those farmers survive b/c they are basically using unsustainable practices and transforming natural resources (soil fertility) into cash at the _expense_ of sustainability. There is basically no market for sustainable practices other than some small public relations gimmicks. People/companies are trying things, but the scale agriculture operates it makes the problem exceptionally challenging.
Whoops, I ran into $UNFORESEEN_VARAIBLE and it cost me a ton of money. Now I lost the farm or can't get a bank to give me an operating loan because they don't agree with my practices.
There is plenty of room to innovate in agriculture but _how_ to do it (successfully) is vastly different than innovating in tech, manufacturing, pedagogy, etc.
Economists typically measure inputs either in terms of total financial costs, or specific types of inputs, typically capital and labour. As is being discussed elsewhere in this thread, energy is also a principle input, and there's a strong argument that it should be considered on its own terms.
In that reading, true, and a major consideration. It could also mean that apparent progress (efficiency gains) are not. And there are multiple inputs or consequences of farming (both modern and ancient) which sharply increase costs:
- Use of nonrenewable fossil fuels whose true costs of creation (the 5-million to 1 ratio of rates of formation to consumption https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C...) are unaccounted.
- Contamination of sinks at rates exceeding their clearing rates (atmospheric CO2, local soil salination, downstream nitrogen and phosphorus polution leading to algael blooms and dead zones, downstream animal wastes with both chemical and bioactive consequences).
- Stripping of soils at rates ~100x that of their formation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26824479
- Degradation of natural biodiversity and ecosystems at rates exceeding their ability to recover and regenerate.
All that said, the basic notion of technological progress remains: can more be achieved with less. What you're rising is a critically important point, but it remains one of making an accurate assessment of inputs and outputs. Within it however is an identification of an Achilles heel of markets: they don't assess long-term or diffuse costs, and hence systematically and persistently bias toward underaccounting for these costs and their consequences.
Markets also fail to assess long-term and diffuse benefits, which is to say that their inherent focus is on the short term, direct, and manifestly evident.
My direct intent in my initial answer was to define what is meant within the economic orthodoxy by "progress" or "efficiency".
I've worked in ag-tech and I think that long-term sustained contact with decision makers for growing operations will be much more revealing than R&D budgets.
Long-term sustained contact with decision makers are also a relatively small cabal and notoriously fickle (IMO).
It's hard to sell people something new when their margins are very small and the risk of failure is high even when you do _everything_ right (weather). Thus, these decision makers usually go with what has worked in past and are extremely cautious to try something new. That mindset contributes to some serious moats in ag (tractors, seed, chemical, fert companies).
Technological progress is not slowing, but it is being slowed down, like accelerating a car while having the handbrake slightly engaged.
On one hand we have the constant need to do more with less, building on top of our evergrowing pile of collective knowledge and wisdom.
On the other hand we have economic forces that drag down tech progress: Patents, trade secrets, conflicting corporate interests, planned obsolesence etc...
Also, I wouldn't agree much with the argument that new things take up space from new things. New and old can co-exist, the issue is that you are buying the same tech over and over again slightly revamped
they would still need to innovate to beat the competition. But if there is no planned obsolescence, then their competition includes their old products as well, so it guarantees that there's at least one competitive option.
Therefore, i argue that planned obsolescence is removing competition.
this newer model wasn't better in any way that i could appreciate. sure it had a bunch of useless apps attached to it and the brochure was filled to the brim with lists of shiny technologies, that didn't make a ounce of difference in the power usage or water use (at least not compared to our 10 year old model). Driers haven't improved in power usage at all in the last 30 years.
A washing machine manufacturer has little incentive to make his product better when he knows that his customers will keep buying his washing machines anyway. Creating "new" models could be as easy as giving the thing different paint job.
It then makes difficult to sell, for example, graphics cards because customers that wanted to buy a card now have to buy a washing machine because it unexpectedly broken down and may then resort to buy cheaper model from competition. The manufacturer will end up with less money to pour into R&D.
I wrote this with the assumption that the washing machine company shares their market with competitors employing the same strategy, entrance to the market is extremely hard because dominant players own the patents which require huge up-front investment with uncertain results due to the rivals' strong market position.
The 1940-70s productivity boon seems to correlate (to my knowledge) with increased chemical input usage. Perhaps these were short-term wins at the cost of long-term damage.
We can't really afford not to continue progressing in all fields.
It's mind blowing to me that I could find no reference to the Haber process[0] in the article at all.
The missing input here is fossil fuels.
Certainly mechanical automation has played a factor, but the number 1 contributor to increased crop yields worldwide is the use of nitrogen based fertilizer. We have completely disrupted the natural nitrogen cycle and are completely dependent on nitrogen fixation for modern day agriculture. The Haber process is an essential part of nitrogen fixation and is also completely dependent on natural gas as a feedstock for the process.
We have had amazing growth in agricultural output in the last century not because of our inventive minds but because of our ready access to hydrocarbons.
In a world increasingly at risk because of this dependence on hydrocarbons it's borderline irresponsible to use agricultural production as a proxy for "technology" and not even mention the relationship to fossil fuels.
It is currently most economical to source the hydrogen for the Haber process from natural gas, but there are many alternative ways to produce hydrogen. I wouldn't call that true "dependence".
If you currently eliminated fossil fuels from the process the price required to maintain our current food levels would escalate dramatically. In practice this would mean likely that both food production will drop and food prices would rise.
I don't think it's disingenuous. Maybe I should add "affordable" as a prefix to nitrogen fixation, but "less economic" fertilizer means "less economic" food which is a fairly big problem.
> While less than 0.1% of global dedicated hydrogen production today comes from water electrolysis, with declining costs for renewable electricity, in particular from solar PV and wind, there is growing interest in electrolytic hydrogen.
When do you think we'll see >50% of hydrogen produced with green energy via electrolysis?
I'm betting: "not within our lifetime", but enjoy taking long views on these things and being wrong. Just curious when you think that's realistically feasible, and when we'll reach 10% (again, I'll still vote "not within our lifetime")?
I'd be delighted to be wrong on this, but still haven't convinced myself. I would be genuinely interested to see your targets on this and then we can interpolate and come up with some milestone we can agree will be seen in our lifetime if you're correct.
[1]https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/hydrogen-prod...
They didn't go into depth about these topics and I don't know much about farming. Do you think there are non-fertilizer based techniques that would be sufficiently beneficial?
For anyone else that doesn't know this video helped me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XTeKmccl7w
EDIT: ...and so did scrolling down below the abstract in the linked article. ^_^;
It doesn't matter how much you spend on R&D if we hit the limit of what we can do with biology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuBisCO#Genetic_engineering
There's tons about plant bio we don't fully understand and a lot of room for R&D. An imperfect measure, but in 2021, Google Scholar added over 5,000 results for the term;
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C23&as_yl...
Plenty of arable land, but ideally we only want the most efficient land in production.
https://theexchange.africa/industry-and-trade/agribusiness/w...
It's not just food from fields. Meat also is overproduced to be exported in countries like the US, UK or Germany and others.
https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-imports-ranking-count... (some countries, like the US, are both big im- as well as exporters)
I know from following relevant news that here in Germany we could significantly scale down our environmentally bad big pig farms, which also suffer from crowded conditions and not exactly a good life for the animals, if not both the businesses involved as well as government concerned about GDP and creating a lot of exports would oppose restrictions on the meat industry.
I'm not even against meat at all, but this is a bad cycle. We can export more when/if we are cheap, and that requires industrialized "meat production" to the detriment of the animals. The incentives are wrong IMO.
Some might argue that imported cheaper food is better for African countries, but they can't compete on high-tech, they can't compete in agriculture, how are they supposed to bootstrap their economies? There also are reports about all the worn clothing that ends up in Africa, so no local textile industry either.
Unchecked, tose able to produce cheaply will never voluntarily restrain themselves and give up "productive land". Instead, they will use their advantage to conquer ever more markets.
We don't need more corn to eat, but alongside the fact that it's an industrial input, it's a strategic export that works as a part of American foreign policy: other nations are dependent on US crop imports the way they're dependent on oil.
In that way, rising output is always great, as it solidifies our position as an exporter, and lowers the price of the material which prevents competition and solidifies this dependence. And it's a better (more affordable) product for the importer countries.
Sending food from developed nations might work over the short term but you know, before the industrial revolution every economy was an agricultural one. The only thing these countries can export is food.
If the developed nations want to act as a parent, then they would obviously give a lot of things away for free, just like you give food to your children for free. That's not what's happening though. Institutions like the IMF are counting every dollar owed to them by developing countries.
Famine is one of those calamities. It will absolutely destroy the entire economy, and get even bring down governments/democracies.
Over-production is an absolute conscience choice we make.
Do not mistake insurance for waste. Also note that US food surpluses are funnelled into the US Food Aid program which distributes excess production (which we actually used to outright destroy) into preventing famines abroad. This has significant humanitarian, as well as diplomatic value.
Because of the intentional overproduction , the US has not had a food shortage for over 100 years, despite occasional crop failures that have occured.