In response to my post on the future of agriculture, several people emailed me a short documentary that looks at rural Japan entitled The Slow Life.
Here is the video hosted at Google:
My major complaint with the video is that it paints the farm life as some kind of magical industry that is on the verge of collapse. Nothing can be farther from the truth.
There are two big reasons why farming as a profession resides in the single digits in the developed world: 1) automation and 2) large, healthy harvests
For instance, in Japan, nearly the entire industry is automated. For instance, the RMAX is a fully-automated UAV developed by Yamaha (Discovery Channel had an episode on one of its variants used in the US for topographical mapping). It fills several roles including the delivery of pesticides and fertilizers. And there are thousands of them flying throughout the Japanese countryside.
In addition not only has the harvesting aspect of farming also been mechanized but the actual crop yields are essentially the highest in the world. Thus less land is needed to produce more crops. And GMOs will further help productive capacity over the next several years.
Back to the video, while some individuals and families may indeed flee from urban centers to live in quieter, nicer smelling regions, their marginal contribution to farming output is negligible at best.
Arguably their futile exercise provides an excellent illustration for why farms have been depopulated over the last several decades: the manual labor is literally backbreaking and subjugates participants to battle all of the environmental hazards that billions living in subsistence want to flee from. The video captures a small portion of the industry and only shows one-side of it.
Oddly enough, I am somewhat pleased by their actions in part because there are fewer hippies left in the cities. Now if only all of the Naderites would jump on that bandwagon.
[Note: the Japanese government subsidizes the industry and outlaws foreign competition -- so land use would arguably different than it is currently (what is so bad about importing a lot of food?)]