The confounding variable idea is interesting.
Aging farmers are thing here too.
The long term factor that's been headed for our food supply like a missile for years now is the increasing average age of CA farm labor, see here, up to 38 in 2016 from 30 in 2000. Younger folks coming here from Mexico do not want to work in the fields. Maybe it would have been a better strategy to welcome sector-wide unionization a couple of decades ago, leading to better working conditions, higher wages and worker participation in ownership, and producing an organized and funded political base for sane immigration policies, just maybe?
Maybe that would have been a better strategy for humanity in general, but I think they'll find a way to bring in desperate immigrants from Cambodia or India or somewhere to live and work in the fields instead.
2: Robots? Or will they still be too expensive?
I think the article in the OP is right about the confounding of poverty and nutrition in these studies. I wonder if there are enough basic questions about SES for somebody to do the analysis.
I read in Mitchell (but haven't checked his sources) that small farmers have consistently higher yields than large. I've been thinking vaguely that farming really needs to be regarded as a high-skill expert profession, not a desperation-default-redneck thing.
"up to 38 in 2016 from 30 in 2000."
That's amazing, they only aged 8 years while the rest of us aged 16. We should eat whatever they're eating.
Most of the "real" foods at the Dr Mpls farmers market are sold and grown by Hmong folx -- who generally seem to have their own farms. Obviously, they're not going to be working in someone else's fields.
Also, don't you think the Arcade Fire should have an album called Et in Arcadia ignis?
The classic liberal disregard of externalities assumes farm labor to be perpetually ~16 y.o.
5: There's a cause/effect issue about small vs. large farms. 100 acres of prime soil in New Jersey, where the rain is fairly regular and the markets are close by, will produce a whole lot of vegetables. 10,000 acres in Wyoming, suitable only for grazing and only for part of the year, may be less profitable. There aren't any 100 acre farms in the Badlands.
Right. And Mitchell is talking specifically about the Nile floodplain.
because they can't hire sufficient labor
Labor from the agricultural area, or farmer's-market labor in the Bay where even $20 might not be enough to live on?
John Ioannidis has written a fair amount about reproducibility in nutrition studies. Most recent throwdown: "eating 2 slices of bacon (30 g) daily would shorten life by a decade, an effect worse than smoking"
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2698337
No. They use all the water to cool servers now.
Per BLS, https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/occupationalemploymentandwages_santarosa.htm , in the Santa Rosa area the mean hourly wage for workers in "farming, fishing, and forestry" is $15.56, which interestingly is more than in food service at $14.10/hour. The BLS farm wages are lower in Salinas, at $13.24, San Luis Obispo County is similar, but higher in the Vallejo-Fairfield area (I can't tell whether that includes the area around Dixon or not), at $16.36, and higher still in San Mateo County at $16.92 (I am assuming this includes e.g. Pescadero). Those cover all of the wider Bay Area locations of farms I am familiar with. It is very interesting to see the occupations on those BLS surveys with lower hourly wages than farming - child care, cashier, food service, "personal care aides" and other occupations that involve taking care of people's bodies.
I deeply agree with the OP about potatoes. I'm thinking of opening a bar that serves nothing but beer and fries. I'd call it "Ketosis", so if anyone asked about how a patron's diet is going, they could say they were in ketosis. We'd bounce anybody who asked for ketchup.
Only Russians and alcoholics drink vodka.
Fries are like 70% water. If you were careful you could stay hydrated.
I've been thinking vaguely that farming really needs to be regarded as a high-skill expert profession, not a desperation-default-redneck thing.
Does she produce stuff that isn't twitter?
I was pretty dubious about using robots for ag until I saw these videos, especially #4. Now I've been thinking about how hot the Valley will be and that maybe humans shouldn't be working out there. Especially if there isn't a replacement cohort that wants that route out of desperate poverty.
She audits food chains. A consultant, not a farmer. But every now and then she'll list her farm experiences; they sure sound like she knows the business.
I ask not because I doubt her expertise but because I don't want to read twitter.
Only Russians and alcoholics drink vodka.
I've just laid down some blackberry vodka to mature, in the hope that it'll be drinkable by Christmas next year. I suppose it's easier to become an alcoholic by then than somehow to acquire a Russian passport.
yes, my farmer friends are all relentlessly going on about "we need robots." those videos are cool!
re: 2, there is a whole community of Hmong families with central valley farms, but the interest of succeeding generations in continuing to farm ... declines. how those folks' grand parents and parents came to the central valley is a whole thing that isn't politically replicable in the current environment. there is a big difference between a steady supply of skilled farm labor willing to walk and drive to you across borders without legal status vs. folks who would need to cross oceans. NAFTA upended a longstanding political settlement in mexico that was favorable to multi-generational subsistence farming combined with seasonal labor in the US, instead encouraging urbanization of labor, so it isn't just the more stringent enforcement of immigration laws that began under Obama that is choking off the supply of farm labor to US ag.
28: A little fifth column activity and you're sorted.
In theory I'm optimistic that robots could maintain the yields of industrialized agriculture while mitigating its downsides - monoculture, monocrop, dependence on pesticides. No idea how realistic that is.
Ooh, I'm not sure about that. At least for the videos I linked, those robots are operating under exceedingly groomed conditions. Perfectly formed beds and furrows. Those fields look precision graded to me (probably by a tractor that is damn near an autonomous robot). I can see robots working in industrialized ag, but it'd be much hard in irregular fields with cover crops.
Dr. Taber also has a podcast, but I dunno if that is more or even less tempting than Twitter for you.
Is sustenance farming sustainable?
35: Russians and people who used to be trapped in the Russian Empire.
32: I think video #3 is actually more impressive: mechanical weeding plant-by-plant, like a human. Industrial agriculture is what I was talking about. Smaller-scale applications will be much harder but not impossible.
My cousin's tractor drives itself, except for turning around at the end of the row.
I totally added value there.
One way or another robots will reduce the damage done by agriculture.
I haven't listened to the podcast myself.
I haven't listened to any podcast ever.
Our local farmers still have a supply of younger back to the earth types who are willing to try farming as a career. It helps that we are close enough to a big market to grow specialty crops and far enough away so that a young farmer could actually afford to lease or buy land. (It helps that you can get a tax cut on idle land by leasing it to a farmer.)
Lots of Hmong folks at our farmers market. With, inter alia, bags of hucks they've faced down griz to pick.
Lots of Russians too. And Mennonites.
Russians I believe, but I have trouble picturing Mennonites trying to steal berries from Hmong workers.
Measured by the amount of income received by farm owners, tax abatements are the most valuable crop grown in my county. At least they are organic!
Most farm owners around here are are trusts that pay dividends to the grandchildren of long gone farmers. Most actual farming is done by migrant workers from Mexico or Puerto Rico.
18. I've been in that bar. They also sell mussels. It's in Brussels.
... but in a world obsessed with control, it is easier to prohibit and shame than to embrace variety and moderation.
This is why the 5/2 thing works up to a point for me: it's about moderation, rather than fads. It just structures the moderation for you so that you're aware of it. The link in 14 complements the Angry Chef's rant beautifully.
On topic: Jordan Peterson's daughter is advocating an all-beef diet.
They have bowel movements in Canada, but not in a way we can understand them.
Body weight is one of the most heritable characteristics ever studied, in much the same ballpark as height. The safer and more secure our food supply is, the more likely people are to reach their genetically predetermined weight, be it thin or fat.
The link from the OP is interesting but this part really doesn't ring true - not, at least, unless you believe that 1980s Americans (and Brits for that matter) were generally suffering from inadequate food supplies. Because obesity rates really have gone up, a lot, since then, and the population has not changed much genetically.
People have gotten taller though. Flynn effect (?).
I'm the same height I was in the 80s, at least the end of them. But much heavier.
According to my phone, I'm active enough that I have all my heart points for the week and it's only Wednesday. I should be leaner.
56: Dunno. They certainly have here.
54. I suspect that what they meant by "safer and more secure food supplies" is "not nearly enough pizza, sodas, and ice cream."
So there's one serious, serious social problem we've fixed in the last 30 years!
Or could it be simply that people can now put as much cheese on their pizzas as they always wanted to.
Or it could be that general financial insecurity is creating stress and making it more likely for people to gain excess weight.
59: Average height for English men was 175cm in 1950 and 177cm in 1970 according to this
As of 2012 it's 177.8 cm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_human_height_worldwide
I would imagine that the situation's very different in east Asia.
63 last: No doubt. As 60 says "secure food supply" isn't a detailed enough description. Presumably reaching one's inherited height will depend not just on adequate calories but on adequate nutrients of other kinds - protein, calcium, whatever. Presumably that's what's happening here, since no-one was starving 30 years ago. (There are visible height differences between 15 and 30 year-olds, for instance.)
Presumably that's what's happening here, since no-one was starving 30 years ago.
But that average height is for all adult males, remember, so someone who was born in 1950 in Roc Island might well have had a hungry childhood and adolescence and be short as a result, even if they were perfectly well fed from the age of 25 onwards, and so they'd still be showing up in the statistics (if they were still alive) as a short adult.
63, 64 - Lots of people in 1950 had been children during WW1 when malnutrition and food adulteration were very common.
65: I'm not talking about population averages, I'm talking about much smaller cohorts. I'm 175cm. Among 30yo colleagues I'm taller than male average; among 15yo students, shorter. The older generations are shorter still, as you say, but there are dramatic changes much more recent than that.
67: I've been told that's not so much to do with adequate food supply as with a Westernised diet, i.e. high protein. 40 years ago they may not have been starving but they may still have had less protein. But I don't know.
70: That's what I was thinking in 64. Though maybe that isn't a Western diet so much as a paleo one, which would be consistent with the heritable height idea.
It's cloudy here, I can do the searchlight thing.
In my old small town in China there were a fair few hunchbacks of a certain age.
I think the term is "a bell tower of hunchbacks".
"An unalterably congested sidewalk of hunchbacks."
In my old small town in China there were a fair few hunchbacks of a certain age.
Fair - so Liqian County?
More or less regular boring Han Chinese. If they were anything, they were Dong or Miao. Definitely not Roman.
OT: I knew the pattern, but I had no idea it was so drastic. It wasn't all in my head that I'm not surrounded by young people.