Comment by kragen 2 months ago
Farming isn't an industry. It's just how you have a civilization when population density is higher than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle can support. People have been farming in Arizona for several thousand years.
Agriculture is an industry. Of course it is. It employs people, it makes use of technology, it is a distinct sector of the economy.
Industry refers to a particular way of doing things that involves portable use of power. Instead of relying on natural cycles (wind-, water-driven machinery), it involves the use of engines (steam, gasoline, electrical) to drive tractors, pumps, produce industrial-scale fertilizers, etc. These engines can be constructed where there are lack of natural resources, or made portable, thus decoupling them from locations of natural resources. That decoupling is what allows industrialized systems, including industrial agriculture, to scale.
Agriculture is largely practiced with industrial methods now, but it's been around a lot longer before proto-industrial methods (water and wind mills). For example, Egypt, as a civilization, benefited from the natural flooding and silt of the Nile. It's been the bread basket for empires for several thousand years. They were not using industrial methods two or three thousand years ago.
There are also other forms of agriculture that is not easily recognized by the narrow lens we have today -- such as perennial food forests, hidden in the ruins of Amazonian jungles, or the Pacific Northwest, or the forest that used to cover the lands between the Appalachia and the Mississippi river. Those were not organized with the concept of employment, and it is distinctively low-tech.
Yes I would generally agree that once agricultural moves from merely being an exercise in survival to being a marketable activity, it becomes an industry. In that sense, agriculture has been an industry in western civilization for quite a few centuries.
>Farming isn't an industry.
It both is and isn't. Have you seen PETA footage from inside factory farms? It's hellish in that special way only the industrial revolution could produce.
As of 2019, 72% of Arizona's water supply was used for agriculture.
I don’t know why this was down voted. This is historically true.
The modern canal that runs through Phoenix is built on top of ruins of a much older canal built by indigenous people for farming.