Japanese agriculture is in a critical situation. However, many urban workers, weary of capitalist competition, dream of a semi-agricultural life in the countryside.
My Experience as a Rice Farmer
131–140 of 226 posts
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, farmers still need roads, and hardware stores, and grocery stores, and hospitals, and HVAC and plumbers and before you know it, you need villages for all the people those people depend on, along with their families.
Farming communities have already had these things, the broad pattern is that fewer and fewer of thiese thigs are needed as fewer and fewer people are needed to work the same land. Urbanisation ratios have increased, farm worker percentages decreased, average land area holdings increased so stores, schools, etc. are closing. As time passes now, more an more old farm hoses are vacant island in an ocean of larger consol…
Fewer people are needed to work megafarms, but the basic needs for these services don't go away entirely. As a result, moving people to the urban centers still leaves you with all the things that you hoped urbanizing would get rid of- roads and rural communities.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#133I hear sentiments about farming from lots of burnout software developers. I always wonder what made them become developers at all. Cause my primary motivation for selecting a job was that I explicitly didn't want to ever work manually, I knew that since early childhood and it still didn't change even after 2 burnouts. My secondary motivation was that I liked working with machinery/computers. Also when I started codin…
I got into software because being an introvert, I always had trouble dealing with people and here were computers that always unquestioningly and faithfully obeyed all commands and that level of control always appealed to me.
Yet I like planting stuff and gardening as well - why? I think it's a side effect of growing up with parents and grandparents who did that sort of thing as a hobby and I feel it's a bit of a comfort zone for me.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could probably reduced cultivated land by 50% if we would stop wanting to eat mid-sized or large animals (cows and pigs).
It's not that simple. Large herbivores are necessary for many environments and useful agriculturally even if we didn't eat them. Desertification caused by removing trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil, monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory farming and profit-motivated short-termis…
I'm fairly sure there weren't 1.5 billion cows in the world before humans.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corn is still cheaper. If you're really poor in Asia you're eating corn (and complaining about it).
If you go into a Chinese supermarket, it will quickly become apparent that the default cooking oil is corn oil. I find this an interesting contrast with the United States, where the default cooking oil is Canola oil (if you're a person looking to cook your own food; this is the sense in which the Chinese default is corn oil) or soybean oil (if you're a company looking to sell packaged food in grocery stores). As far…
China has a minimum purchase price of corn that's set by the government in order to maintain food stocks. It's also part of a larger jobs program (that I don't know much about).
China also imports 80% of its soybeans which means it's based on the rising/falling prices of oil and whatnot.
In the US, soybeans are a very important crop that's fed to livestock and also used in biodiesel production. There's enormous soybean "crush" infrastructure in the US to support the biodiesel market and the side effect of this results in tons of extra soybean oil. It ultimately ends up with soybean oil being cheap compared to everything else.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most folks it's just an add on. I have grandparents in Europe that have a garden where they grew potatoes and about 50 other things I'm not gonna list. They make jams, pickled things, and various other preserves. It's something to do and kept them sharp until they hit their late 80s.
Agreed. There's a world of difference between 'farming' for personal to small scale production as not quite a recreation but also not quite a job, and farming a low margin staple at high volume as your primary and sole means of earning money. And I think when most people speak of the dream of returning to rural society to e.g. farm, they're speaking very much of the former rather than the latter.
That has been my experience as well, having immigrated from Eastern Europe to an enclave in the US. We know at least a dozen families (including our own) with 2-10 acre homesteads and all of them had previous experience with gardens and dachas in the Soviet Union that they used to grow supplemental produce, so no one came into the deal with delusions of making any profit. Everyone gives away the excess to neighbors of which there is usually a lot because yields are high on hand tended trees (and dutch bucket hydro).
The single biggest reason these farms exist is because American retail produce is mostly garbage. It’s so economically micro-optimized that all flavour has been wrung out of it. The only way many of us immigrants can get back the flavors of our childhoods is by growing the fruits and vegetables ourselves, if only to have control over the varieties, the vast majority of which are not sold in stores (>95%). That nostalgia is what pays the margin.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#137As a child, I grew up in a village in China and our family farmed rice. It was mostly my mom who was doing the farming while my dad worked in the city. Some things I remember: * Seeing hired buffalos tilling our fields * Playing with frogs and catching tadpoles in the fields * Someone with a machine that removes the husks would come to our village during harvest * The smell of rice fields. I recently smelled it again…
>My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago > The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other dir…
> Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago
Except this time, the dream is actually real and cheaper than ever thanks to small EVs, batteries and solar power. 100 years ago it was limited to people with large estates who owned cars (and probably needed secretaries for their work).
These days it's more affordable than ever (except land/housing)
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everywhere, you are looking at only suburbs vs cities.
The amount of people that want truly rural environments is infinitesimal. Everyone wants a huge house with lots of land far from neighbors. But then they want the state of the art hospital to be close. They want to be able yo reach the closest airport in max 1 hour. They want their kids to play with other kids, ideally without being chauffeured around endlessly, etc, etc. What I've discovered is that humanity has mas…
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Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could probably reduced cultivated land by 50% if we would stop wanting to eat mid-sized or large animals (cows and pigs).
It's not that simple. Large herbivores are necessary for many environments and useful agriculturally even if we didn't eat them. Desertification caused by removing trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil, monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory farming and profit-motivated short-termis…
some ruminants are good because they can turn inedible biomass into calories. However the scale at which we farm them is orders of magnitude beyond those levels.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. There's a world of difference between 'farming' for personal to small scale production as not quite a recreation but also not quite a job, and farming a low margin staple at high volume as your primary and sole means of earning money. And I think when most people speak of the dream of returning to rural society to e.g. farm, they're speaking very much of the former rather than the latter.
That has been my experience as well, having immigrated from Eastern Europe to an enclave in the US. We know at least a dozen families (including our own) with 2-10 acre homesteads and all of them had previous experience with gardens and dachas in the Soviet Union that they used to grow supplemental produce, so no one came into the deal with delusions of making any profit. Everyone gives away the excess to neighbors o…
Where is this wonderful community, I would love to have neighbors like your described and where I can work in tech but still have 10 acre garden.