Information; History of Agriculture...

nao57

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I really like agriculture. And gardening. Farming just naturally comes as a built skill as you figure out how to keep upgrading your gardening skills from year to year. Eventually you get to a point where you start to figure things out. And then you realize you could do some small scale farming.

But the reason I really like it is that you can use it to make yourself live free. More FREEDOM. When you work for others you don't have freedom.

And part of the reason people hate farming is actually that they are manipulated to hate it because we live in DEBT economies and DEBT societies that shackle people down with debts. So you need to not go into debt so you don't have to work to death. Although in developed countries we get taxed to death too but that's for another story...

At any rate,... when I was in my first years of gardening, very naturally an idea popped into my head one day. And that idea was... You know for the number of hours I am doing per week gardening, I could do chickens for less time than I'm spending in the garden. And have more food. (Well at the time I wasn't that good at producing food...) But you see how this naturally leads into upgrades? You just start upgrading to be more efficient. And then you realize that some things you could add like poultry will make your time and life better.

I hope that thought will help someone.

And if you can reduce your groceries and how much you PAY the STORE you can then be more willing and able to help your own family and people in need. And that's beautiful when you can help people. And your poverty reduces as you realize you can take care of yourself.

...


OK... so here's the history of agriculture thought...

One day I was reading a book on the black plagues of Europe. I found a few interesting bits there. And that led to the discovery that there used to be a MASSIVE wave of sheep dairying in the UK after the black plagues and after the 100 years war. This gets a bit tricky to pin down because there was more than 1 plague. But after the plagues hit they had all this land. And they had a shortage of workers and people. But they were still being taxed on the land. So they had to keep it productive. And so they brought in sheep. And that led to Britain having the best textile industry at 1 point. (Although history books sort of erase this to endorse a different group having better textiles at another point.)

Some sources suggest wrongly that the sheep dairy era where it was bigger than cattle dairying was bigger before the plagues. But many sources state that its more accurate to say the plagues were first. And part of the changes were the big factory cities taking off; and that's not real popular to talk about because it'll come out how many hours and days people had to do working in the factories, but it was a different era and you have to judge different eras carefully since it was a different time.

But the sheep dairy era was very dominant at 1 point, and was bigger than cattle dairying. That's whats kind of interesting because many people didn't know that could have happened. Especially now where people are used to hambuger and ground beef being king of food.

This is very interesting from several data points. First, sheep are easier to work with for women and children. And they are easier to work with than cows also. This would have been a very good life. You can get food, clothing, and other things from sheep. Cows though... take a lot more land. And harder to work with. You can see how some people would have wanted to have more power and control so they pushed aside the sheep dairying era in the UK and Europe when the industrial age and factory cities took off. That led to them sending out the troops and kicking people off their land especially in Scotland and then putting them in big factory cities where they'd work over 14 hour days everyday... with less freedom and they don't get to be their own boss....

Now between the factory cities and the sheep dairying which would be a better life...? Working 14 hour+ days or... working the dairy?

They call that the industrial revolution when the factory era came in. And when you learn about industrial revolutions you notice a pattern where there's loss of freedom when new technology comes along. We're entering into a new industrial revolution now with AI, if things keep as they are...

Well I'll stop there. But I find it interesting. Very few people know there used to be a sheep dairy era in the UK. And many of us have ancestors from there so...
 
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Oliver Buckle

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The time line is a bit confused I think. The black death struck in the middle of the 1300's, there was a great shortage of labour after it which lead to a breakdown of the system where peasants were tied to a particular master as masters tried to poach each others labour. Sheep really took off 400 years or so later when it was discovered that grazing sheep on land that had been cropped, rather than trying to crop it again and again, or leaving it fallow for a year, worked much better. That coincided with the first water driven industrial spinning and weaving and thus the start of the industrial revolution.
People always used to talk about pestis, black death, arriving from the orient as a new disease, but modern DNA analysis is able to establish that people were dying from it much earlier, as far back as pre Roman times, and that the huge numbers of deaths were caused by a new variant rather than a new disease. I reckon this is why authorities are so concerned about the new variant outbreaks of ebola in the Congo, if it escapes the immediate region it could mean hundreds of millions dead worldwide.
 

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