By Jay Jamison
Drive down any of the main roads of Jacksonville and in a few minutes you will be in the countryside. The Morgan County countryside is mostly planted with corn and soybeans. The immensity of the agricultural abundance is everywhere. Any trip to local grocery stores not only reveals an abundance of food but also a huge variety of types and brands of food. There once was a time when you could only get certain vegetables and fruits when they were in season. However, I can now buy strawberries year-round from local stores. How is this possible?
Let’s start with those fields outside of town. None of those fields was prepared, planted and harvested using animal horsepower. The seeds that were planted are very specialized. Special fertilizers maximize yield. The field prep, the planting and the harvesting of those acres were accomplished with the employment of enormous machines, machines that cost far more than my house.
I suspect that most readers of this column rarely experience long periods of intense hunger. If we want something to eat, we can go to our refrigerators and cupboards, and get food. If there is a shortage there, we can go to local supermarkets and refill our supply. For most people in America, food comes from supermarkets. Most of us don’t depend on our own tilled fields or our gardens for sustenance. So, imagine if the machines which till, plant and harvest the fields stop working, and the supply infrastructure that delivers food to our stores daily is disrupted.
The stark fact is that humanity has existed on the verge of starvation for most of its existence. The introduction of agriculture, thousands of years ago, made it possible for humans to stay in place rather than roam around as hunter gatherers. But agriculture has not remained static over the centuries. With a few glitches, agriculture has been continuously improving through the introduction of new innovations, and this has pushed the foe of famine to an even farther remove. Those who dislike the industrial revolution and want to abolish its improvements, should get used to having empty stomachs. Substack blogger Noah Smith put it this way, “To ask why some societies in the world are still poor is the wrong question. Poverty is the default condition, not just of humanity but of the entire Universe. If humanity simply doesn’t build anything — farms, granaries, houses, water treatment systems, electric power stations — we will exist at the level of wild animals.” — or at least as hunter gatherers.
A friend of mine once told me his impressions of a hippie commune he once visited many years ago. Drugs and booze were plentiful, but there was little thought about from where their next meal was coming. Fortunately, John had thought to bring a fishing rod and tackle. He supplied their dinner from a local pond. I suspect that they abruptly discovered that living off the land requires planning and innovation — fish now, so we can eat later. I also suspect that most of the commune members probably thought that their food originated in grocery stores, miraculously provided by someone else.
I had no hand in designing combines, planters and other industrial miracles, along with the knowledge of how to use them. But I presume that the fantasy of returning to pre-industrial days was cooked up by people with full stomachs. Since poverty is the default position of humanity, only through constant innovation and hard work, can we continue to stave it off.
