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The Story of Industrial Civilization: Agriculture
June 20, 2021 at 10:00 am - 1:00 pm PDT
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Progress writer Jason Crawford is writing a book about the modern world and how it was invented. In a series of salons, we will explore this content together, chapter by chapter, and get an inside look at the author’s creative process.
Behind the world of our daily lives, there is a hidden world, one that keeps our world running. It is an industrial world, one of factories, engines, chemicals, and infrastructure, that most people rarely notice or appreciate. But every piece of it is a solution to a problem: a way to satisfy human needs in the face of nature’s constraints.
Session 3, Agriculture:
Before the Industrial Revolution, about half the workforce had to be farmers, just to feed the population. Even when times were good, diets were not varied and food was often not fresh. When times were hard, people went hungry and faced the threat of famine. Today, farm labor is more than 1,000 times more productive, representing only a few percent of the workforce—and we enjoy a secure, abundant supply of fresh food from all over the world. How did this happen? We’ll explore how we solved the challenge of soil fertility, mechanized the manual labor of farming, bred better varieties of crops and livestock, and learned to preserve food throughout the supply chain.
Crawford will open the salon by talking about his research and writing on the topic so far, followed by discussion and Q&A.
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