[permaculture] How many farmers?

Toby Hemenway toby at patternliteracy.com
Thu Nov 6 11:23:08 EST 2008


Not to specifically pick on Marjory, since I've seen (and even used 
myself) this number often. It started me thinking:

Marjory wrote:
>  Throughout  pre-fossil fuel history, at least 95% of people 
> primarily worked to produce food. 
But I began wondering if that's true. I checked my own library and the 
Web, and it looks like the number has been more like 75% in Europe, 
China, and other parts of the world that had cities (in other words, the 
places where most of humanity resided), since about 2000 BCE. The great 
historian Fernand Braudel points out that in Europe, roughly 25% of the 
people lived in towns of more than 2000 people by 1500. There were lots 
of smaller towns where a significant percentage did not farm, too, so I 
suspect that the worldwide average has been 75% for many centuries. 3 
out of 4 makes a very different society from 19 out of 20. A lot of 
people weren't farmers.

Also, historians point out that before the industrial revolution, 
farming was quite part-time. Lots of work in the spring and fall, about 
half-time in the summer, and almost none in the winter. By the 1600s, 
some farmers began doing crafts during the winter to generate cash as 
consumer goods appeared. It took the industrial state to force full-time 
work upon the population.

It's inevitable that as oil gets more expensive we'll see more people 
get into farming. But since we only use 10-15% of our oil in the US to 
grow, process, and ship 4000 calories a day per person, we've got a long 
way to go before we won't have enough oil to grow food via the wasteful 
industrial method. Food will get priority for oil as long as we have 
oil. Frankly, I expect industrial-nation people to get into farming 
because high food prices will make it lucrative decades before we become 
farmers out of need.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com




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