"In 2021, [[Kansas]] is the country’s leading wheat-growing state and so we move to the [[Arkansas]] River Valley. In this heart of American wheat country, farms are now commonly three to four times larger than they were a century ago—and yet most of the field work is done by only one or two people operating large machinery. "The US Department of Agriculture stopped counting draft animals in 1961, and field work is now dominated by powerful tractors—many models have more than 400 horsepower and eight giant tires—pulling wide implements such as steel plows (with a dozen or more shares), seeders, and fertilizer applicators. Seed comes from certified growers, and young plants receive optimum amounts of inorganic fertilizers—above all, plenty of nitrogen applied as ammonia or urea—and targeted protection against insects, fungi, and competing weeds. Harvesting, and the concurrent threshing, is done by large combines that transfer grain directly to trucks to be transported to storage silos and sold around the country, or shipped to [[Asia]] or [[Africa]]. **Producing wheat now takes less than two hours of human labor per hectare (compared to 150 hours in 1801), and with yields of around 3.5 tons per hectare this translates to less than two seconds per kilogram of grain**. "Many people nowadays admiringly quote the performance gains of modern computing (“so much data”) or telecommunication (“so much cheaper”)—but what about harvests? **In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of [[American]] wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two seconds**. "**This is how our modern world really works**. And as mentioned, I could have done similarly stunning reconstructions of falling labor inputs, rising yields, and soaring productivity for [[Chinese]] or [[Indian]] rice. The time frames would be different but the relative gains would be similar. **Most of the admired and undoubtedly remarkable technical advances that have transformed industries, transportation, communication, and everyday living would have been impossible if more than 80 percent of all people had to remain in the countryside in order to produce their daily bread** (the share of the US population who were farmers in 1800 was 83 percent) or their daily bowl of rice (in [[Japan]], close to 90 percent of people lived in villages in 1800). "**The road to the modern world began with inexpensive steel plows and inorganic fertilizers**, and a closer look is needed to explain these indispensable inputs that have made us take a well-fed civilization for granted." ([Location 1084](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08SGC3TD3&location=1084)) --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[urbanisation]], [[agrarian-economies]], [[industrial-economies]], [[modern-economies]], [[technology]], [[systems-thinking]], [[food-production]], [[farming]], [[solar-energy]], [[photosynthesis]], [[fertilisers]], [[insecticides]] **Source** -- [[202412030828 - B - How the World Really Works]]