How is farming an “auto-catalytic” process?

Question

How is farming an “auto-catalytic” process? How does this account for the great disparities in societies, as well as for the possibilities of parallel evolution.

Answer 1

I think this is kind of over analysis, over examining agriculture. If you want to say that farming is autocatalytic in essence what you are saying is that farmers do so because they wish to get into the gold rush, the money, as if it were a time of gentlemen farmers and turn of the century estates. Little else that I see would make someone think that farming was autocatalytic. I can't imagine it was even in the time of the great cattle barrens or the cotton estates. If you look at farming and wish to establish a list of what motivates people to farm, like anything else in our culture, making a living has a great deal to say for it. We don't farm to go into debt, although it sure seems that way at times. People farm because they can make a living at it sure. But there are other factors. Farmers grow up in farming communities, on the farms themselves for the most part. Many farms are family owned for many generations, some change hands as they are sold or portions of them. Few grow up in an urban environment never seeing cows or combines and go to agricultural school and then buy a farm. Some do, but it is more a thing one grows up with. Once agricultural colleges had higher numbers of attending students but if anything there is a limiting factor as to how many graduates can fill actual farm positions, or even research positions. How many farmers does it take to s***w in a light bulb? Just one, all the workers are out in the fields weeding while the farmer changes the bulb. The workers need only a strong back. Point is, most farms need very few staff with degrees. Just the owners in this modern era of farming, and only in those countries that have that higher living standard.

The disparities in societies are really representative of living standards, the wealth of the individual nations, and in regards to their farming community, it is the ability to produce foods to feed a population and the quality of their exports. That in turn frequently is a reflection of climate in both the long and short term (long periods of drought or flooding), of legislation that governs the actions of the farmers, and of support by the government for the farmer. In the international community just being able to feed the population is not enough. The international community is made up of members that are not equal, their strengths and weaknesses are as varied as they are. Because we are a world made up of different countries there will always be differences; some rich and some poor, some in a state of flux and all striving to climb to new heights. The differences are those of economics and politics, money and power, not about the ability to feed people. Everyone has the same information, there are no big secrets in agriculture, no special formula, no secret farms. It is all the environment/ climate and how the governments provide for agriculture.

As to parallel evolution, didn't that happen in the Western countries in the 60's? I have a hard time remembering as the saying goes. There was a huge evolution in all aspects of life then but the farm really got quite a short term make-over and some of that is still with us. I feel a lot of what we see today really was fueled somewhat earlier by the social changes that trickled down everywhere in our culture. I say earlier because they would have happened eventually, but it was a good and timely wake up call. Homesteading, farmsteading, self sufficient communities, found a new home in the industrialized nations, but that was really what has always been the bare minimum in so many countries all along. What we called communes here was called poverty in other places. And in still others it was just home as it has always been. So what is parallel evolution? That seems more a point of view, but if it is anything like the 60's, that should be interesting.

Answer 2

Life transforms the environment, such that the living component of the environment comes to predominate over the physical environment, after which most evolution involves adaptations to other living organisms. Thus the complexity of the living component of the environment comes to greatly exceed the complexity of the physical environment that it is embedded in.

Each improvement in agriculture leads to further improvements, so farming is an auto-catalytic process.  That creates a disparity in societies when agriculture processes evolves faster in one place, like Europe or America, than in other places like parts of Africa or Asia.

You have parallel evolution taking place any time environments are separated from each other with no exchange between them.