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My Experience as a Rice Farmer

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Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#191

Post by defrost »

zdragnar wrote: post #132
defrost wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps reread the upstream and pay close attention to the usernames and who said what.

> all the things that you hoped urbanizing would get rid of- roads and rural communities.

I spoke about the actual real in this moment trend that is already happening; increased urbanisation, I said nothing about wanting to see the end of roads or rural communities - although I'm a big fan of seeing less human impact on larger areas of managed land - land that includes agriculture, mining, native reserves, cropped treelands, etc.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#192

Post by 9rx »

Pay08 wrote: post #186
9rx wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why manual work has been so denigrated over the last century. As a farmer, it is funny to see how people react to you based on the current profitability winds. When farming is a money maker, everyone acts envious and treats you like a king. When times are tough, they think you're a slack-jawed yokel. I expect in that lies the answer to your question: We denigrate anything that isn't, as a rule, making…

> When farming is a money maker, everyone acts envious and treats you like a king. While I'm not a farmer, from my experience they still call you a yokel when it's profitable.

Well, yeah, they'd call me a yokel. They'd also call me that when I'm at my tech job. But not the farmers they see getting rich and wish they were.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#193

Post by defrost »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #173
satvikpendem wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is often costlier and worse for the environment to ship locally than across the world. https://www.wpr.org/news/locally-grown-fruits-veggies-expens...

But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live. We do not have the capacity to ship food halfway round the world because picky eaters don't like the idea of eating meat and potatoes.

We do have the capacity to ship massive tonnages of grains, meat, fruits, livestock around the globe and we use it ensure sufficient pipelines to feed a billion+ global population across all seasons and weathers.

Costs at that scale are large, transcontinental railways across mountains, lifting tonnages against graivity in addition to rolling friction, braking energy and return to steady motion energy repeated for frequent stops and loading, transfer, loading times add up.

Per tonne per kilometres costs of floating container ships and binned grain ships are easily competitive.

There are points to be made about the lower tonnages of picky people foods, lobsters, fancy beef, a Bugatti Chiron tucked away amidst a cavern of self loading basic electric cars .. but there's still an underlying current need to transport food from source to demand.

The costs of global shipping transport is iron mining, steel formation, build times, fuel production, fuel side effects, and so on - fuel side effects are a bit of a pressing issue, and have been since at least that 1967 absolute banger by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald they chose to call Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity

> But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.

Sure, that's very much what Jill says, nice lady, actually a former first lady of the state I live in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#194

Post by thaumasiotes »

riskable wrote: post #135
thaumasiotes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soybe…

OK... but I have followup questions.

Why does the minimum purchase price of corn in China not make corn oil, a derivative product, more expensive?

Why does the low price of soybean oil in the United States not make soybean oil cheaper in China?

If the reason corn oil is cheap in China is that it's imported separately from the grain and therefore immune to the price floor... wouldn't that imply that corn oil is also cheaper outside China?

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#195

Post by esseph »

knollimar wrote: post #184
esseph wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Dozens or hundreds of workers for every manager or foreman. There's also a lot of owner/operator one-man shops.

Consider the turnover rate as an geometric series. Also 1 foreman in the electrical field runs effectively 50 guys max if good, and smaller sites might be 10 men to a foreman. I currently have 3 foreman running 5 to 6 guys each at my current company (2 close sites of 3)

50:1

10:1

Big range, but still a lot of workers for every foreman.

(Father in law did 35yr in carpentry and teaching job corps)

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#196

Post by thaumasiotes »

bgnn wrote: post #176
thaumasiotes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc. There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat. Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.

Wait. Dod I read this right? Are you saying rice isn't real food but meat is? I understand most cultures over-appreciate meat, but treating a premium carb source like rice lowly is a surprise.

Why? Rice is what you eat if you can't afford anything better. This parallels every other culture - the staple food will keep you alive, but if you have any money, you'll eat something better than that.

You know how "bread and water" is considered a terrible diet that only prisoners eat, and then only because they're not given a choice?

(And how modern prisoners get a much better diet?)

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#197

Post by knollimar »

esseph wrote: post #195
knollimar wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the turnover rate as an geometric series. Also 1 foreman in the electrical field runs effectively 50 guys max if good, and smaller sites might be 10 men to a foreman. I currently have 3 foreman running 5 to 6 guys each at my current company (2 close sites of 3)

50:1 10:1 Big range, but still a lot of workers for every foreman. (Father in law did 35yr in carpentry and teaching job corps)

It's really not the ratio but the turnover. Guys who aren't making it up into leadership self select after 5 years or so.

The ratios seem unbelievable to those in tech, but I'm just saying you're unlikely to make it to 10 years without having at least the opportunity for some leadership.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#198

Post by indemnity »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #40
indemnity wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in a similar environment, similar trajectory, but in Africa. Dad was a teacher in a rural school, mum stayed at home. Until I went to school I would stay outside all day with my friends, playing in and around the rivers and dams, making our own fun with abandoned cars and rusted out farming equipment. Our school had one computer, and I was lucky enough to get to use it after hours from time to time. I would…

This is rural Scotland in the late 1970s / early 1980s. I'd like my small son to have the same opportunities that I had, instead of a school where the playground has lots of very carefully manufactured play equipment and they get to sit and look at iPads instead of working out for themselves how to program a BBC Micro.

This is super hard for me as well.

I know that a part of why I did so well in programming was being forced to think about what to do and how things worked for so long, and it gave me a lot of stamina to brute force my way through problems.

But these days, I'll admit even I reach for an LLM more often than not, and I can feel my mental muscle memory atrophy.

I don't know how to give my son the same experience (currently at age 8, he still does not have any of his own devices, and has highly restricted access to the iPad).

But still...

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#199

Post by Noumenon72 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #161
Noumenon72 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think specifying "recorded history" would remove the confusion. Human history could refer to the history of anatomically modern humans, including before farming.

History is recorded, that's the definition of the word. Prehistory is not recorded which is what the 500 kya to 10 kya refers to.

The wikipedia for "Recorded history"[1] draws the distinction this way:

- Before writing: prehistory

- After writing: recorded history

- Both together: human history[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_history

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_history

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#200

Post by TheDong »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #196
bgnn wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. Dod I read this right? Are you saying rice isn't real food but meat is? I understand most cultures over-appreciate meat, but treating a premium carb source like rice lowly is a surprise.

Why? Rice is what you eat if you can't afford anything better. This parallels every other culture - the staple food will keep you alive, but if you have any money, you'll eat something better than that. You know how "bread and water" is considered a terrible diet that only prisoners eat, and then only because they're not given a choice? (And how modern prisoners get a much better diet?)

It's much more nuanced than that.

Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare. Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.

Rice and tea (ochazuke) is historically the "bread and water" equivalent in Japan, but people of every socioeconomic class still eat rice and miso soup for breakfast, eat rice balls (onigiri) regularly, and generally eat a diet with a lot of rice.

Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.

I wouldn't be surprised if the middle class and lower class eat more-or-less identical quantities of rice.

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