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We Were Once a Nation of Farmers. Now Rise Up, Robots, And Harvest Our Food

Agriculture killing machine.

In 1870, nearly one in two Americans were farmers. Half the country worked in agriculture; we were a nation of farmers. Now that number is closer to one in 50. The number of workers who toil in food production is but a fraction of the population. These days, most of us hardly know where most of our food comes from at all.

Economist Thad Woodman crunched the U.S. Census data, and put together a handful of visuals that drive home just how much agricultural work has declined—and by extension, how much the nature of our society has evolved—over the past century.

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As you’d expect, the number of non-agricultural jobs have skyrocketed since 1870.

Once evenly paired, the ratio quickly grew lopsided as more efficient farming techniques were developed and the population boomed. The following chart from the U.S. Census Bureau shows said boom:

But the most important factor was improving farming; less ag work could feed more people with fewer inputs. Here’s the U.S. Department of Agriculture graph that tells that story, at least from the 1900s:

The agency notes that “Over the entire 1948-2009 period, labor input declined at an average annual rate of 2.5 percent,” though it seems to have leveled off again for the time being. But know that the trajectory is likely to continue; the story of the decline in ag work has been one of technology, of capitalism, and of industrial farming operations.

The vast majority of our food now comes from large-scale industrial farms; 80% of our livestock is reared in concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. The big food companies continue to compete, relying on innovating the inputs to get more crop yield for less. They use more efficient machinery. They use more herbicide-resistant GMO crops and hence, more pesticides. There’s more contract labor, which means more low-paid, no-benefits jobs, typically filled by hard-working immigrants—and there are fewer lifelong farmers and small farms.

So what’s next? What enables this trajectory to continue, when everything’s already pretty maxed out?

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Robots.

Eventually, that is. Right now, an operation like this, the Prospero robot swarm farm, is way more expensive than its human-helmed counterpart. Same goes for this robot lettuce farm.

But that’s where we’re heading, as robots get cheaper, and human ag workers keep demanding things like money for their labor. That first chart ends in zero.