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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

> Before the Civil War, over half of the country’s residents were farmers, Jolliff said, and they worked with small parcels of land in diversified operations. The modern regenerative agriculture movement encourages that same type of farm diversification.

Yea, and before the civil war, we didn't have gasoline engines. You are never going to see a broad return to rural farming life ever again.

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We HOPE we never see a return to rural farming life…

the ghost of Pol Pot has joined the chat

I hope we do, but modernified. You grow most of your staples and you reduce your reliance on the system, acting as a true UBI because you can take care of your family. Work becomes increasingly optional for those who seek more than what modern abundance self gardening could achieve. A few hours of daily work and all the time waisters of modern tech. Just need enough money to pay property taxes.

I don't think we'll get every other person to choose farming as a career again.

You realize, once Petroleum runs out this century, humanity is completely screwed right ?

Forget transportation/energy, our economy is chemically hooked on to it like a coke-addict.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMWzjrRiBg

If the transition doesn't happen, we're looking at it dropping to 1-5% of its size now.

I hope we do this before we take out the rest of the earth with our cancerous global-scale genocide of everything - animals, plants, cultures, 'different' humans, languages and cultures.

The U.S. has centuries' worth of proven natural gas reserves. If we ran out of oil (that's not happening anytime soon) we could use natural gas for transportation just fine. Much of the world already uses natural gas for transportation. We could then save the remaining oil for plastics.

> once Petroleum runs out this century

Weird. I had that on my calendar for _last_ century. I wonder what happened?

we have so much oil and natural gas, we're going to transition off of petroleum before we run out

And coal. Massive amounts of coal which could be gassified in a pinch if there were nothing else.

Agriculture uses only a bit over 1% of US primary energy demand. We use more energy cooking food than we do growing it. And that's with the large inefficiency of growing feed crops for livestock.

Replacing fossil fuel use in agriculture is a minor problem compared to replacing it in the economy as a whole.

Love a good opportunity to shill a post from my favorite subreddit of all time!

https://preview.redd.it/every-time-v0-s3c958v8vylc1.jpeg?aut...

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