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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] How many farmers?
  • Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:23:08 -0800

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





  • [permaculture] How many farmers?, Toby Hemenway, 11/06/2008

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