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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Progress A hundred and fifty years ago it took twenty-five men to all day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain. With a modern combine harvester, a single person can do it in six minutes. In other words, it contributed to a 2,500-fold productivity increase.
– Johan Norberg writing in Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future.
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24 men thrown out of work by greedy capitalists.
– And the evil KILLUSOL that the combine spews in its exhaust!!!
Does that six minutes factor in the farm boy having to crawl around inside it for an hour trying to get grease into umpteen grease nipples?
Automation of farm work depopulated the countryside and condemned many to the urban factories and slums of the industrial age.
Was that progress for the people involved?
Yes, because they were no use at all in the countryside and would have starved with no means of support.
Next.
“Does that six minutes factor in the farm boy having to crawl around inside it for an hour trying to get grease into umpteen grease nipples?”
Even back in the mid 1980s when I was working among farm machinery they had advanced onto a network of pipes and a reservoir to do this job. I’m not sure of the details of how the system worked as I would only have had to investigate if it had gone wrong.
Stonyground,
Interesting! I suspect there aren’t too many grease nipples on a modern combine, but I think they’ll still exist on machinery powered off the PTO. I remember the old rectangular balers had a lot of them too, and the ones in the PTO’s universal joints were a right bugger to get at. Whenever I see a bearing with a grease nipple on a piece of gym equipment I’m reminded of that job.
Good.
I stopped reading, and started fapping off, when Newman mentioned “grease nipples”.
150 years ago a “day” on the farm meant sunrise to sunset.
Let’s not also forget a couple or three other improvements.
150 years ago, you would be very lucky to get that ton of wheat (about 35 bushels) off three acres of land. Now you can get about 2 tons to the acre. 6 times the yield per acre under cultivation.
150 years ago, for every acre that you grew wheat on, you needed at least another acre to support the draft animals you had to have to grow wheat – so effective output is halved again.
And finally – a modern combined harvester harvests so efficiently that operators start to get worried when the grain loss reaches 3 or 4%. 150 years ago, 20-40% of the grain was lost during the harvesting process.
We should be amazed at how effective modern agriculture is.
llater,
llamas
It is, as usual, more complicated than that.
In olden days, you had to factor in the time spent making the scythes and flails, the time the miners and woodworkers spent preparing the materials, and the time the farm laborers spent sharpening the scythes. In the really olden days, you needed the time the flint-knappers spent preparing the sickles.
Today, there’s a vast chain of enterprises mining, milling, and forging the iron; drilling and refining petroleum for fuel (and grease for the nipples), making the combine, maintaining the combine, paying for the combine, et cetera.
In the US there are some local crops, and some that are grown all over the place. The ones grown everywhere (like wheat, maize, millet, and soybeans) are subject to the movement of the seasons over the land. That means harvest time starts here and ends there, over a period of time. Migrant harvesters will follow the harvest. But these days, some of those migrants own harvesters and trucks and companies. A harvester costs a lot; it’s inefficient to use it for just one farm. So they start where the harvest is earliest, and keep moving on until the harvest is over.
Now count up the efficiencies of labor. It’s just a wee bit harder.
By the way, the link function does not seem to work for me. But I looked up the diary of one of these families, which may be found (with copious photos) at
http://allaboardharvest.com/category/z-crew/
Yup, as opposed to the starvation-prone rural hell of the pre-industrial age
“Automation of farm work depopulated the countryside and condemned many to the urban factories and slums of the industrial age.”
Yeah, I too remember when all this was The Shire. And they even threw Sam’s old Gaffer into poverty.
FFS. I bet you’re threshing yourself over Stig of the Dump porn right now.
Stig of the Dump? Shades of Edward Ardizzone! I would never, not ever, have thought to see that reference on Samizdata. Ever. But I guess I was wrong – again.
llater,
llamas
There are many, many grease zerks all over a combine. It’s a half day’s work to hit them all.
(The OP makes it sound as if farmers must be rolling in the money these days. As in so many other industries, most of the additional profit found in modern farming has been siphoned off by those in one group: the financiers.)
“With a modern combine harvester….that took 100 men, from multiple industries, a few days to manufacture and assemble.
Of course the buggy whip braiders were 5hit out of luck, until the internet brought us ALL into the
pornfine arts renaissance.Perry, “Yup, as opposed to the starvation-prone rural hell of the pre-industrial age”, have you forgotten already what what the opening ceremony to the London Olyimpics taught us about the bucholic pre-Industrial Age “?
Didn’t Stig join the Labour Party and eventually become its Great Helmsman, or was that some other bloke?
My Gramp was born in the little rural Welsh speaking village of Hermon in West Wales, in 1882. It would have been called a one horse town, but they couldn’t afford a horse between them. They were so piss poor they didn’t even have the proverbial pot…
Aged 14 he got an apprenticeship to an Ironmongers in the big wicked city of (don’t laugh) Mountain Ash! The whole village clubbed together to buy him an overcoat so he didn’t look like a hick in the big city when he arrived (he’d only had a red flannel cloak before that) and he couldn’t wait to leave.
Gramp was a Victorian with a can do attitude. He ended up as manager of Bedwas Colliery. Not bad for a hick from the sticks.
@Perry de Havilland (London)
> Yup, as opposed to the starvation-prone rural hell of the pre-industrial age
To expand a little — “where one bad frost meant you watched your children die.”
But on the topic, increases of efficiency are one thing, what about the things you simply couldn’t do? Like cure infections, or provide cholera free water. Here in America it used to be that some family would decide to “go west young man”, and when they did before they jumped on that wagon trail they hugged their mother and father, brother and sister in the sure knowledge that they would literally never see them again. Me? I visit my family in Scotland regularly, and skype with them more often.
For those who lament the long gone glorious past I have two words for them: “dental anesthetic”.
Almost every single bit of this huge productivity increase is based on cheap energy from oil. The remaining bit comes from Norman Borlaug and his ilk, and it is also huge.
If the fucking dumbshit lefties succeed in wrecking the oil industry or banning GMOs they will kill billions of us. And I hope that as many lefties as possible are amongst the dead.
Yes:
Regarding cheap energy from oil, I heard recently that a hundred or so of our elected representatives had voted to “divest” any investments in the oil industry from their pension funds. I expect that if they screw up their pension funds as a result of such pointless posturing it will be the rest of us who bail them out. In any case, if they really were in any way sincere, they would need to stop feeding the oil industry by not using any product whatsoever that has used oil in its manufacture and distribution. In other words they need to stop using any product whatsoever. Then they can quietly die of starvation or exposure and leave the rest of us in piece.
Fred Z, don’t forget Messrs Haber and Bosch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Economic_and_environmental_aspects
I first read about it in this excellent book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Knowledge-How-Rebuild-World-Scratch/dp/1847922279 which is a fascinating read into a lot of the industrial processes that we rely on without thinking about.
150 years ago a “day” on the farm meant sunrise to sunset.
These days, for a contractor, it would mean sunrise until long after sunset. Although I concede sitting in the air-conditioned cab of a monster John Deere is a litte more pleasant than looking at the south end of an ox heading north all day.
If the fucking dumbshit lefties succeed in wrecking the oil industry
The people in it are making a pretty good fist of that themselves.
That’s a great site, thanks!
“Stig of the Dump? Shades of Edward Ardizzone!”
I have no idea. Please enlighten.
I just thought it was about the idea that in some way eating dung was more fun or righteous than getting a pizza or something.
One of my kids is flying into eastern Colombia this morning. The people are very apprehensive about their Venezuelan border, as Venezuela just announced that they can now only produce about 40k bbls of their 200k bbls daily demand for gasoline. The end seems near, and it will begin with oil.
@ NickM – ‘Stig of the Dump’ was a seminal book in my childhood, and the editions we had at school, which I now find were first editions, were illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. I can still see his drawings in my mind’s eye.
I was gobsmacked to see the reference to something I had not seen or heard of for nigh-on 50 years. I was unaware that this has become a metaphor for preferring a life of Stone Age privations over the comfots of modern living.
llater,
llamas
EdMj-As Haber-Bosch uses natural gas as a hydrogen feedstock, we’re back to the oil and gas business.
bobby b –
Venezuela has announced that personal gasoline quotas are officially increased!
From 4 litres a week to 2.
Of course along with progress comes the idle foolishness of the now rich, something that used to be reserved as the folly of Kings. Consider this exhibit… I mean it is hard to make fun of it since its utterly clueless self parody can’t be improved on.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/raw-water-trend-sounds-bad-003839153.html
bobby b (January 2, 2018 at 7:57 pm), the group you identify may be the chief culprits in the states. Over here, the eurocrats ‘support’ of the agricultural sector has done its bit to keep food prices high and farmer’s incomes low.
Cheap energy from oil+gas, Norman Borlaug, Haber+Bosch: these are all late developments. I don’t mean to dismiss them, but the fact is that sustained, unprecedented economic growth started, in the West, centuries before all that.
Speaking for myself, i credit, first (chronologically) the Investiturstreit, for creating an opportunity for the rise of capitalist city-republics in an arc ranging from Italy to the Low Countries; second, the introduction of New World crops to Europe, in particular the potato, which was the first major step forward in the increase of labor productivity in agriculture. (Maybe i should also credit the Portuguese development of navigation techniques which made it possible to reach the New World and bring potatoes back from there.)
More than that. My great grandmother got up at 4:00 AM to feed the animals year-round. Even on the longest day of the year that was almost two hours before sunrise. She was doing this closer 100 years ago than 150, but I doubt things were much different between the two.
My brother-in-law was a dairy farmer. He got up before dawn to milk the cows. True, with modern equipment he could milk more cows, but he still got up before dawn. (These days, older and wiser, he farms beef. You don’t have to milk a steer.)
However, there is no mention of how tasty the bread was, when it was harvested using artisinal methods, and then lovingly transformed into loaves of bread by the hand of a wise and caring woman, dripping some honest sweat from her brow into the dough, giving it a certain je ne c’est quoi.
And, in addition, all of the moral and ethical righteousness that flows from doing honest work in the dirt makes the old ways so, so superior to modern ones. It also gives writers an opportunity to bloviate about the subject, too.
(/s)
@rxc
In response to your sarcasm, I am reminded of a series I watched on TV on the history of bread making (yes, a series not just one show, and yes it is weird that I watch stuff like that.) One of the ironies they pointed out is that in the past barley bread was considered the lowest form of bread, that you ate when you had nowt else. Now it is considered “artisan”, and costs three times as much.
Which to me is a parable for the whole “longing for the good ole days.”
It is kind of like me and nature… I like to get back to nature occasionally, as long as it is near an air conditioned hotel with free wifi, and a chocolate on my pillow each night.
@Fraser
I look for stuff like that, too, because I am interested in how things are or were made – it is the engineer in me. And I like to bake my own bread, as well, and do lots of other stuff like that, because I just like to do it. Same reason I like to do my own plumbing repairs (within reason), fix stuff on my boat or car, and even do some carpentry. But I don’t try to look down my nose at people who aren’t interested in the same things, and dismiss stuff made in a factory. I think GMO crops are wonderful, but I do occasionally try some older types of flour (spelt, barley, etc) for bread, just to see if the flavors are interesting. It is a hobby.
I even used to bake bread when we lived in France, where the bread is WONDERFUL. There, the standardized baguette has a set size and maximum price, which cannot be changed. You have to shop around to find the baker who does them best. If you just want calroies, then buy the cheapest baguette at the nearest “grand surface”. However, if a baker dusts the baguette with a bit of flour, or put it into a slightly different shape, it becomes something else and the price can be adjusted accordingly. You can add a tiny bit of whole wheat flour, and double the price for “pain complet”.
I am astounded by the insistence of the progressives on the goodness of old ways and methods that just make production more expensive, and often reduce the quality of the product. It seems to me that they just want to make production costs as high as possible, in order to suppress demand.
We used to live in a hamlet in France outside Bordeaux, and our neighbors made wine. We learned a LOT about the life of an agricultural worker, and it is clear that it is a LOT of hard work, under often challenging conditions, with high risks from weather events. And if you don’t produce a very highly priced product, you cannot afford to hire manual labor to do stuff like picking grapes, so you buy a machine to do it, and even invite the neighbors to help, in exchange for a meal and a bit of vin. Farmers use machines because they help deal with the uncertainties, and make them more productive.
rxc
> We learned a LOT about the life of an agricultural worker,
Yup, people have some crazy ideas about agricultural workers in pre-Victorian times one of the most common being that farmers were small business men rather than little more than serfs. In fact it was the manufacturers (blacksmiths, bakers etc.) who were better off than the agricultural worker. And somehow we have an idea that dangerous child labor was introduced in factories. Yup, kids lived an idyllic childhood of hard labor, dangerous conditions and constant danger of losing it all in pre-Victorian times.
Pete asked,
Yes, an increase in productivity helps people directly or indirectly, which is why the average poor family in America live a higher quality of life than 2/3 the world’s population and better than Italy’s middle class. The “computer” and “robot” arguments are the equivalent of automated looms that upset the Luddites so. Speaking of the Industrial Age, people today (i.e. leftists) saw children working. What they didn’t see was a) children starving, begging or prostituting themselves for food, and b) the process that eventually eliminated child labor in the western world.