I grew up on a farm. Like most young people who were born in rural areas, I left for college and never returned. Farm work is grueling, hot, or cold, dirty, and never ending. Is farming better than the alternative? My question is not about a career choice. Rather, it is about whether farming is better for society than the alternative.
If you study history, the conventional wisdom is that humans began to plant seeds and domesticated favored plants around 12,000 years ago. Farming was the birth of modern civilization as we know it. Once people could cultivate the food they ate on plots of land, they could put down roots of their own. Humans began to build permanent villages, permanent houses, and fortifications to defend what they owned. A surplus of food allowed people to specialize in different occupations other than hunting animals (men’s work) or gathering wild crops (women’s work). No longer having to scavenge for food, the population increased because food was more plentiful and could be stored. This also gave rise to nation states and armies to defend them.
The Atlantic recently asked the question, Was Agriculture the Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race? The debate is based on a paper by Jared Diamond, a historian, university professor and author. You can read Diamond’s paper here. According to The Atlantic:
The argument largely rests on research that shows our nomadic forebears were healthier and had more leisure time than those who chose to farm. Diamond, who wrote this article in 1987, when overpopulation concerns were rampant within the American environmental movement, argued that, “forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.”
Diamond is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book became a series for Public Television. Diamond credits the economic growth in the West as the result of beneficial geography and seemingly dismisses political and economic institutions as a factor.
Economist Andrea Matranga talked to The Atlantic about the evolution to farming. She argues that farming began due to changes in climate that required humans to store food for the winter because famine and starvation were endemic in nomadic life. Matranga’s recent paper, “The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture,” suggests that for 200,000 years humans ate like the grasshopper in Aesop’s Fables. During times of plenty – mainly in summer – they ate well. During the winter months they often went hungry and sometimes starved. Then something changed and it occurred relatively quickly.
Climate seasonality increased, meaning winters got harsher and summers got drier. Hunter-gatherers couldn’t keep up with wildlife that fled for warmer climates. Birds can fly south for winters. Humans can’t. So they realized they needed to start storing food during good times. That meant the end of our nomadic lifestyles because people had to remain near those stores.
When you’re a hunter-gatherer, the real problem you have is that it’s not so much about how much you eat during the average periods of times, but it’s what you do when things are very bad. And so for an anthropologist who happens to be there in a regular year, it looks like everything is great. But every 10 years, maybe, there’s a really bad year, and there’s a famine, and everybody’s starving. Now, if you don’t happen to be there in the year in which they’re having a famine, then you don’t understand why anybody would like to switch. That would be one of the caveats I would put to that hunter-gatherer issue.
Of course, the notion that humans could all still be hunters-gatherers sounds ridiculous, but consider this. For 200,000 years humans were hunter-gatherers, whereas we became farmers beginning only about 12,000 years ago. That suggests that humans scavenged for their food 95% of the past 212,000 years. In other words, farming is a relatively recent adaptation. If the climate had changed more gradually (or later) we most likely would be thousands of years behind in our civilization and economic advancement. All the technology we now enjoy would not exist if humans had not switched to farming when we did. There would also be far fewer of us.
The Atlantic article is worth a read. It’s both thought provoking and eye opening: Was Agriculture the Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race?