Comment by carbonguy
6 hours ago
> Mechanisation/Mechanization of farming basically put 99% of farm-workers out of a job.
Stats like this get thrown around a lot but it's worth considering that the ABSOLUTE numbers might not actually change that much over time.
With agriculture specifically, we can make some rough estimates that, before mechanization (say, 1760-1800 period), there was maybe 10^9 people on Earth and they were all employed in agriculture. So ~10^9 farm-workers.
As of 2024, FAO estimates of global agricultural workforce put the total at about 892 million; call it ~9x10^8. [1]
So, more precise (but perhaps not much more accurate) to say that mechanization put 10% of farm workers out of a job, not 99%.
Now, it certainly IS true that mechanization allows (or forces, depending on your perspective) 90% of the population of Earth to do something other than farming, which is the real point you were making - Technology DOES have a way of disrupting what we've been doing for generations.
[1] https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights...
Yah - people get fooled by the drop in the relative percentage of the population when the absolute numbers are not actually changing that much. What is real is that the structure of overall society does change - food production becomes less of a concern and people shift their focus to producing other things - but it's wrong to imagine that food production is less important. It just becomes relatively well optimized and less economically productive (i.e. lower ROI for capital). You still need the food just as much.
Something doesn't add up --
> The agricultural sector employed 892 million people worldwide in 2022, which corresponds to 26.2 percent of total employment.
However, in the USA:
> Direct on-farm employment accounted for about 2.6 million of these jobs, or 1.2 percent of U.S. employment.[1].
The USA grows enough food to feed itself[2], so this indicates that either the rest of the world still hasn't mechanized farming (possibly due to poverty/cheap labor), or that crops in the rest of the world are particularly resistant to mechanization. If the rest of the world was at the same level of mechanization as the USA, the total number of people employed would be about 5% of what it you cited.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58282 [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6041859/
> or that crops in the rest of the world are particularly resistant to mechanization
The causality is somewhat mixed up here. People in the US don’t, for the most part, grow rice because it doesn’t pay a competitive wage in the US. So parts of the world with lower wages end up growing most of the rice.
Brief research says it does vary wildly based on crop,country, and phase of agriculture. The FAO says:
China has been mechanizing in the last two decades and is up to ~73% overall but 80-90% in wheat, rice and maize.
Sub-Saharan Africa sits at ~10% tractor use across crop farmers, with Ethiopia at ~1% utilization in land prep, and Nigeria at 7% tractors/25% animals for "traction".
India & South Asia ~40-50% across all farming activities
India tilling/plowing "over 70-80%"
India sowing & Harvesting ~30-40%
Major contributors to these figures seem to be relative low cost of labor, lack of capital, farm fragmentation/small plots, and terrain.
I used to work with a guy that started a nonprofit providing tractors to sub-saharan africa. He routinely met farmers/land-owners who could technically purchase the machines, but would choose not to because the profit margin was actually higher if they used human labor. They would accept the machines as donations because at that point the cost of the machine actually made the machine viable economically against the human labor.
I imagine this also extends to politically unstable regions. Buying the machine "pencils" to an American who can be relatively reasonbly sure that they will be able to farm the land for the number of years required to recoup the expense of the machine, but less so for an individual not entirely certain that they will be allowed to own the land for that long.
Yes; In short, if you can depress human costs enough, automation may not be competitive. This is not really an optimistic result for people.
Either way... still a lot of farmers
If we mechanize effectively, 20 times fewer than there were a century ago.