FiveThirtyEight: Manufacturing Jobs Are NEVER Coming Back.

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146. I'm not sure I agree with your assessment.

They were involved in farming because they chose to be. Home and the land were mini factories. The way you made your living was with the land. No Land no wealth. People did not move to the cities by choice. They original moved there because they had no land to live on. They later moved there because the factories needed them and by under valuing agriculture products, the capitalists could get cheap workers to fill their factories. They at 1st took the dredges of society, children, women, girls, Irish or the most recent immigration or minority group, the poor were the first people to be lured to the factories and into the cities. You can NOT run factories if you have to hunt down workers scattered among the rural populations. You had to get them off the farms.

They got people off the farms by lowering the price of farm products. If they undervalued what a person can make off the land, then those people and their children had to look elsewhere to earn a living. And the factories and the capitalist were all waiting to take advantage of them.

Yes, now you have tractors that can dig and plant (though "NO Plow" is making those machine obsolete) but they can't pick grapes, they can't harvest sun ripen tomatoes or collect flowers or pick peaches and plums. They don't even do a very good job of planting seeds without waste. The huge house sized combines used today are used mostly on grain crops - corn, wheat, soybeans. Crops that corporate farms export. Crops that are hard and hold up when moved around like luggage.

I'm sure there are a few specialized machines that can harvest (beans and unripe tomatoes) but mostly they can only do it on green hard fruits and vegetables. Delicate and tender produce, odd sized vegetables and crops with indeterminate harvest times still have to be picked by hand.

I question the efficiency of today's food production. Today we import as much food as we export. Wouldn't a more efficient system be to sell the food we grow on nearby farms to nearby people? Why are we wasting so much energy moving food around to different parts of the world and yet people still go without enough to eat. How is that efficient? Why are we growing so much corn, wheat and soybeans when most people in the US don't buy those items in vast quantities? So, they have to be exported or sold to processors. Why don't we have a national farm plan that makes sure the food we buy is grown here? It seems to me we have a very inefficient system of farming that has no common sense..

Some foods have gone down in price but some foods are still very expensive. If you want tasteless chewy carrots and bland fruits grown in baths of chemicals you can get them fairly cheap. If you want sugar drenched carbs with saw dust added for fiber you can get them fairly cheap. But if you want food that isn't drenched in chemicals, wont make you fat and that tastes good it can be very expensive. That's why niche farming and small farms are making a come back. The food people want to eat is going up in price and you can making a living off your land again.

But really, I run a small organic farm and there aren't any machines that can do two thirds of what I need done - wish there were, I would buy them. I have to hire people or do it myself. Those farm machines don't seem to be suited to small farm life. They are only useful for factory farmers who export their excessive over production of grains.