It's a really popular thing to look back on the past in a rosy way and agriculture provides no exception. Indeed, a lot of people look back to a romantic sort of imagined past about prior farming generations and what the economics of farming were like.
Indeed, back two decades ago now (my how time flies, eh?) there was a popular pundit of the quasi apocalyptical nature who was convinced that computers were all going to go belly up on the first day of the present millennium and we'd be thrown back into a sort of dark ages. He still thinks that we'll be so thrown back, and indeed I think he secretly hopes for it, but one of the things he maintained at the time as that this would be worse than the Great Depression as so many people had farms to go back to, he believed, in the 1930s.
Well, maybe they partially did, but what' people like that fail to realize is that the depression for farmers started in the very early 1920s, not 1929.
Lots of things played into this, including a vast cycle of over production in North America that commenced with Europe entering into World War One, a dry climatic period that came in the 1920s following a wet one in the 1910s, and the relentless onset of mechanization.
A couple of blogs dealing with the topic by folks more knowledgeable than I.
No comments:
Post a Comment