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cal market in a horse drawn wagon transportation will be drastically reduced because the people will have been relocated to much closer to where the food comes from this solves many of the difficulties of human scale agriculture most of the others are solved by the personal attention that is absent in large scale machine agriculture but present in human scale agriculture 4 comments yes human animal powered agriculture can feed the world july 14 2021 july 14 2021 you can t sustain current population with only human and animal powered agriculture we need machines to feed the world this is an attitude that i ve run across more than once and yet it seems that those who express this attitude are always unwilling to provide any reason that it should be believed i would have liked to take the argument of someone who believes this as my starting point but being unable to find such an argument i have been forced to create my own after considerable thought the below is the most intelligent argument i can make against the idea that the world could be fed by human and animal powered agriculture hereafter natural scale agriculture 1 natural scale agriculture requires smaller farms than machine agriculture which in turn means more farm families the switch from human animal agriculture to machine agriculture drove many farm families from their land and into the cities and this process continues as the machinery gets bigger a current 1 000 acre mega farm was likely at one time 25 or more natural scale farms more farm families mean more farm houses and barns which means less land in production if a 1 000 acre mega farm was divided into 25 natural scale farms that would mean 24 more houses which might take a total of 12 acres on the high side out of production from the total of 1 000 extrapolated across the board this could mean a 1 2 reduction in farmland in production under natural scale agriculture 2 natural scale agriculture requires different farming methods for example natural scale agriculture does not lend itself well to the spraying of glyophospate or herbicides on crops while natural scale agriculture does not preclude the use of hybrid seed per se natural scale farmers are far more likely to choose heirloom varieties and save their own seed because overhead irrigation is not available rows must often be planted further apart to ensure each plant receives adequate water to thrive all of this results in a lower yield per acre according to purdue university data from 1866 to about 1937 us average corn yield held relatively steady at about 25 bushels per acre in 2019 thanks to technology and machinery average corn yield was about 170 bushels per acre 3 horses mules donkeys oxen and even farm hands require food unlike a tractor or combine which only uses fuel when performing work humans and animals require food at all times if it rains for a week and no field work can be done humans and animals still require food while a tractor will sit in the barn consuming nothing the part of the farm devoted to pasture or grain for draft animals is land that is not producing food to feed the world 4 growing crops with 1 7th the yield on 1 2 less total land and then devoting part of that land to feeding animals instead of humans would result in far less food being produced for humans such a reduction in the amount of food available for humans would cause widespread starvation and a failure to feed the world hopefully this argument is not too much of a straw man unfortunately it must be somewhat of a straw man as i have been forced to create it myself however perhaps this article will spur discussion and provide me with other arguments to interact with first natural scale agriculture fits in smaller places than machine agriculture in preparing for this article i asked a current farmer who farms a very large acreage with machines what size field is the minimum size for such agriculture he told me that 10 acres is the cutoff and any field smaller than that is not likely worth planting in machine agriculture however in natural scale agriculture 10 acres can be an entire farm the acre itself is a remnant of the medieval measure of the amount of land that could be plowed in one day by one man behind one ox so for a one ox plowman fields as small as a a half acre are worth plowing its a half day s worth of work and human powered agriculture using wheel hoes rotary cultivators or simply hand hoes can productively farm a much smaller field which we tend to refer to as a garden there are many small fields and other marginal areas that are not conducive to machine agriculture but are perfectly farmable using natural scale methods so natural scale farming would increase not decrease the total amount of farmable land secondly the much lower yield of natural scale agriculture would be a concern if the entire yield of machine agriculture was going to feed humans however this is not the case according to the usda in 2019 13 620 million bushels of corn were produced of these 6 257 million bushels went for food alcohol and industrial use 30 million bushels went for seed use 5 897 million bushels went for animal feed and 1 778 million bushels were exported this adds up to roughly 300 million bushels more than was produced which was made up by using previous stores and imports now lets look at the 6 257 million bushels that went for food alcohol and industrial use of these 6 257 million bushels 4 857 million bushels went to alcohol for fuel in other words 36 of the corn grown went for ethanol fuel which is clearly not human food and does not feed the world if we convert that to acres it means that there are 29 million acres currently farmed but not used to grow food and which could easily be converted to food production however that s not all 232 million bushels went for industrial starch 419 million bushels went for high fructose corn syrup and 356 million bushels went for glucose dextrose since none of these are foods that s another 6 million acres available for food production for a total of 35 million acres we ll assume that natural scale farming would require as much seed as mechanical farming and leave seed use alone that brings us to the 5 897 million bushels that went for animal feed the vast majority of this is feed for cows in commercial dairies and feedlots in one sense we could consider this as going towards human food and feeding the world as humans eat beef and dairy products which are more nutritious than corn however if we consider trophic losses and the fact that cows can eat grass on pastures that are too steep rocky or otherwise featured to plant crops on or on land that is going through a necessary fallow cycle it becomes clear that it is unnecessary to devote prime cropland to feeding cows this frees up another 35 million acres of cropland bringing the total to 70 million acres 70 million acres when only 81 million acres of corn were harvested 86 of the corn harvested does not go to feed people since only 1 859 million bushels of corn for human food were grown on 81 million acres of corn the human food yield per acre for 2019 is 22 bushels per acre below the average yield of 25 bushels per acre from 1866 to about 1937 furthermore average corn yields for natural scale farmers today is likely much higher than 25 bushels per acre i do not know what the figure was for 2019 but wendell berry cites 70 bushels per acre as the lower end of corn yields for natural scale farmers in the late 1970 s if you wish you can look up the usda data on soybeans the 2 nd largest crop in the us and see how much of current crops go to non food use but i think the corn numbers alone are enough of an illustration to make the point in this article finally while draft animals do indeed eat even when not working they are capable of subsisting entirely on pasture or hay when not working as mentioned above pasture and hayfields can exist on ground too steep rocky or otherwise featured for plowing once the pasture is fenced there is no cost to letting the draft animal graze and because cover crops and fallow cycles are necessary to responsible land use there is very little additional cost to harvesting hay furthermore oxen donkeys and mules are all capable of performing work on nothing but pasture hay horses will require a little grain when being worked but like the other animals will subsist comfortably on pasture hay when not being worked i realize that this article has tore down no arguments other than ones i invented myself and which therefore are at least partly straw man arguments however i hope that reviewing the information has made you more sure that natural scale agriculture is perfectly capable of feeding the world not only at current population levels but even at much larger ones in conclusion i would ask you to consider all the farmers and farm families driven off their land and into the cities by the mechanization of agriculture depopulating rural areas this seems to me to be the very thing the prophet condemned and to me his words demand a reversal woe to them that join house to house and add field to field that they may take away something of their neighbors will ye dwell alone upon the land isaiah 5 8 5 comments a short history of my relationship with technology july 6 2021 i was recently asked if i had ever written an essay on my primitivist philosophy i don t consider myself a primitivist and i don t know if i even have a fully coherent philosophy when it comes to technology and its use but my thinking on the topic has certainly evolved and deepened since i last wrote on the topic here reading and learning on many topics has effected my views including philosophy permaculture responsible agriculture history economics and religion i can t condense the contents of many books into one essay so this post will just scratch the surface of what people more intelligent than i have written let s start with the 5 questions for evaluating technology i posed back in 2014 what benefit will i gain from making use of this technology how much will it cost me to make use of this technology if i adopt this technology am i in a worse place when if it fails than i would be if i had never adopted it should this technology fail is it easier or harder to repair myself than my current system will the regular use of this technology cause me to lose a skill that would be vital should the technology fail all the above questions are focused on evaluating a newly available technology but what about previously adopted technologies things i ve been using since birth should they also be evaluated some rather ubiquitous technologies adopted by many of my peers from birth i grew up largely or completely without i grew up largely without television and completely without video games even today in my thirties i still do not own a television i ve noticed that this results in me having a completely different perspective on the technology than some of my peers when a peer and i discuss the role of television particularly national broadcasts in the destruction of regional dialects and local cultures we interpret this fact differently he sees it as a sad but inevitable loss because of course we couldn t live without television i see it as a needless and wanton destruction because of course television is unnecessary and this negative consequence far outweighs any minor entertainment value when there are so many more enjoyable means of entertainment anyways perhaps it was recognizing the negative effects of an ubiquitous technology that i don t use like television that prepared me to see the negative effects of technology that i do use like cars i don t think i d ever even considered the cultural impact of cars until i read this short article in 2017 but suddenly a lot of things clicked the unwalkability of modern cities the much stronger social fabric and better aesthetics of walkable cities the insanity of transporting food across a continent but mostly i suddenly woke up to the cultural and societal shifts that the automoble brought about perhaps i was primed here too in 2017 my wife and i shared a single vehicle and had done so since getting married in 2015 when she went out of state to visit her parents i rode my bicycle to work perhaps this helped me to see the possibility of living without a car a possibility that i am not currently pursuing more on that later and perhaps i had to see living without a car as possible to honestly consider the damages caused by the mass adoption of the automobile somewhere around 2017 i began looking for a grain mill my wife makes homemade bread and i wanted to mill our own flour rather than buying flour i was going to buy an electric grain mill like both my mother and courtney s mother had when we were growing up but then we happened to buy a hand crank coffee grinder i discovered that i enjoyed turning the crank by hand and i d always hated the terrible racket that electric grain mills make i did some research and found a number of hand cranked grain mills eventually buying one i found several things that surprised me first i was surprised that the mill was far easier to turn than i expected my 2 year old at the time was able to turn it second i was surprised at how fast it was it milled enough flour to bake a batch of bread almost as fast as the electric mill i was used to and ground it finer to boot third i was surprised at how much more enjoyable it was to grind grain using it than with the electric mill sure it took a few seconds longer but the whole process was enjoyable while the sightly faster process with the electric mill was not previous to the grain mill in 2016 when we bought our first house i couldn t afford to buy a riding mower so i bought a fiskars reel mower and mowed our just under half acre lot with it until a friend later gave me a riding mower i loved mowing with it it took a little while and it was hard to push if i let the grass grow too long but it did a great job and it was so quiet and it didn t matter if the grass was wet sometimes i mowed at 6am without worrying about disturbing the neighbors later when i was given the rider i spent far less time mowing but it also was less enjoyable a chore to finish and my lawn never looked as nice having had this experience with the lawn mower coffee grinder and now the grain mill i began to consciously choose to use hand tools more on projects and power tools less i found that this often made the projects more enjoyable they did take longer but i also tended to procrastinate starting less so i didn t find this really impacted the total amount of work i got done even after i began choosing to use hand tools more than power tools there was one particular power tool or machine that i wanted i have wanted a small farm since at least my teens this farm would be diversified and labor intensive making use of small fields that are too small to even work with modern 24 row cultivators and i wan...