When Land Is History

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/when-land-is-history/?singlepage=true

by jackfoxy • 14 years ago

56 19 14 years ago

randomdata2• 14 years ago

I'm the seventh generation to work the land on my family farm. It is pretty amazing to think that so many of my ancestors before me did the very same, albeit with less modern technology. The original barn and first brick home (I'm told there was a rough wooden home that preceded the brick one when my family first settled on the land) still stand there today.

noahc4• 14 years ago

Something most people don't realize is that it wasn't that long ago that we were still farming with mules.

My grandpa farmed with a Jeep that had a PTO and a team of mules into the 60's.

randomdata2• 14 years ago

Some still farm that way today. I know my great-grandfather was using tractors by the 40s, if not before. We still regularly used one of his old relics when I was a kid. The oldest tractor we still use today is from the 60s, purchased by my grandfather.

I don't really know much about the farm on that end before that though. I should do some asking around.

pmsaue0• 14 years ago

Beautiful/generational land razed for commercial purposes? Welcome to eastern Kentucky and mountain top removal.

rdl2• 14 years ago

"too many liberal arts degrees and too few agribusiness BAs", indeed.

netvarun• 14 years ago

Amen. That was the standout sentence in this very well-written article.

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

"and too many huge horizontally operated corporate farms that could produce, pack, ship and market produce more cheaply"

...presumably run by people with agribusiness BAs.

cadlin• 14 years ago

>"too many liberal arts degrees and too few agribusiness BAs"

This is a silly meme. If you look at government data on college degrees (which only goes up to 2004 as far as I can tell), humanities aren't over-represented at all, but account for between 8 and 12 percent of Bachelor degrees awarded[1]. That's History, English, Philosophy, etc. combined[2].

It would be more accurate to say that more people in business should focus on agribusiness instead of finance, or that social science majors should switch to agribusiness[2].

And the percentage of humanity degrees awarded is lower than it was forty years ago, and has been trending down for most of that forty years[3].

Finally, it's rather odd that the author would write that, considering he has both an undergraduate degree and graduate degree in the classics, of all things[4].

[1] http://archive102009.humanitiesindicators.org/content/hrcoIm...

[2] http://archive102009.humanitiesindicators.org/content/hrcoIm...

[3] http://archive102009.humanitiesindicators.org/content/hrcoIm...

[4]http://www.victorhanson.com/Author/index.html

noahc4• 14 years ago

I think you've completely missed his point.

His point is that inside of his family there were too many liberal arts degrees and not enough agribusiness folks. The reality is that if you want to grow organic, all natural, heirloom plants on that type of land good luck! That's the type of production liberal arts degree majors tend to favor.

A person with an agribusiness background would come in and say, "Throw up the irrigators, spray the fertilizer, and lets try to get some organic matter into the soil".

All he is saying is that his family didn't have the right people in the right places to make the right decisions at the time.

jackfoxy• 14 years ago

Victor Davis Hanson, through hard work and luck, has parlayed his Stanford Classics PhD into a successful career as classicist, military historian, columnist, and conservative pundit. I just finished A War Like no Other http://www.amazon.com/War-Like-Other-Athenians-Peloponnesian... which I recommend, but I don't think it's odd for him to write this. Even with hard work most folks with liberal arts degrees won't see much success in liberal arts endeavors, but more specifically I think he was referring to farming, which is a side hobby for him and liberal arts degrees in his family did not contribute to success with the family homestead.

shanecleveland• 14 years ago

History of land use is fascinating to me. I grew up and my parents still live in a house built by my grandfather. I love looking at old pictures and seeing what has changed or not changed in even that short 70+ years. And then to think how the land may have looked and been used in the years before that. I am in the process of building a home on land owned by my wife's family. They have only owned it for a short period of time, but the land has a rich history of settlements, logging, etc.

I think we all have a selfish tendency to think of land and property as being at its best when we knew it most intimately. But the land was there long before us and will be there long after.

jorleif3• 14 years ago

I wonder if more advanced robotics is going to make farming "complicated" land profitable again. The need for flatness etc. might become irrelevant with smart enough automation, and some variability in land form could be an excellent risk mitigation strategy against disease and harsh weather conditions or variability in fertilizer prices and so on.

noahc4• 14 years ago

It depends on what you mean by complicated. First of all you need good black dirt to farm. If you don't have that no matter how flat it is it isn't going to work.

They already have levelers[1] available which get us most of the way there. Again, no good black dirt, it's not worth farming (at scale anyway). A combine or chopper can easily push you over a quarter million dollars, so the guy running the thing for a couple of tens of dollars an hour for a few months a year isn't that much of a cost compared to your input costs, etc.

Variability in land form doesn't contribute to risk mitigation much if at all unless you're talking about large geographic distances, which of course it's the fact that diseases and weather systems don't travel far and fast enough not that the land form is different.

More specifically, GMO provide the best opportunity to address disease and weather issues. That said, maybe that isn't what we should be optimizing for.

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uaYbXtPs_o&feature=relat...

jorleif3• 14 years ago

Variability in land form may lead to different crops being suited for different parts of the land, which would affect both disease and weather risks.

anamax• 14 years ago

> The need for flatness etc. might become irrelevant with smart enough automation

Automation doesn't address the sorts of problems that "not flatness" causes.

Consider irrigation vs pruning, weeding, or harvesting.

Heck, even "hand watering" (which doesn't make much sense)isn't made appreciably harder by reasonable "not flatness".

> variability in land form could be an excellent risk mitigation strategy against disease and harsh weather conditions or variability in fertilizer prices and so on.

What have you grown?

jorleif3• 14 years ago

I haven't ever seriously grown anything, so I admit not knowing much about commercial agriculture operations, but what I was thinking about was the following kind of tradeoff: You can do one thing (e.g. one crop) very efficiently, if that is the only thing you do, by standardising the operation and using efficient machinery and industrial processes. The downside is that you have all your eggs in the same basket, and compared to growing several crops, the risks are much higher.

When it comes to pruning, weeding and harvesting, a sufficiently smart autonomous robot could do those just as well without everything perfectly flat and in evenly spaced rows. However, it is currently much easier and cheaper to do a "stupid" machine that works only in the controlled environment.

When Land Is History

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