Whether you have felt it or not, agriculture has always been an important, if not one
of the most important, part of people’s lives across history. A well-known Chinese
idiom “民以食为天”（Food is the first necessity of the people) certainly indicates
the same idea. Therefore, given the massive significance, people from around the
globe have been dedicated to improving approaches and methodologies to produce
more food so that people do not have to struggle for survival. They were not
improved significantly until the industrial age when machines that remarkably
boosted productivity were created and used in the production of food, and
agriculture stepped into the “modern” realm from the “traditional” society. This
blog is meant to describe both of them with condensed paragraphs.
The most prominent trait of traditional agriculture is that it stresses the aspects of
labor, for example, the amount of labor and the quality of labor. In other words, it is
usually labor-intensive. Farmers have to be responsible for every process
including tilling, sowing, and harvesting. A typical day for an individual farmer is
probably like this: he/she gets up when the day is yet bright and starts the work in the
field. The work repeats until evening or even night when he/she could go back and
rest properly. Indeed, they have tools like sickle, plough, and spade, which facilitate
those processes by improving productivity and information like the best time to sow
and time to harvest, but they all seem less effective compared to modern machinery.
Modern agriculture, on the other hand, is capital-intensive, which means a huge
amount of capital is inputted into the industry. That capital is used to purchase
advanced machinery that generates more productivity than the tools mentioned
above. Combined with efficient techniques, these processes are able to become
easier, faster, and happier. In addition, modern agriculture can get rid of the
dependence on weather, despite not completely. Yet, it makes farmers more
resistant to the uncontrollable, minimising their loss of income and our reduction of
food.
A number of farmers in India are still growing crops in traditional ways, which
partly contributes to the fact that they are under the poverty line with dreadfully low
social status. It is not that they do not want to embrace modern technology that benefits their
production, it is the additional costs that prevent them from implementing it.
Therefore, I believe things would be changed massively if they are provided with
more subsidies and support from the government. Indian farmers are just a
microcosm of farmers in all those developing countries. Thus, in the end, I would like
to call on to care more about farmers in developing countries, respect them, and
thank them.
- Ryan
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