the settler states and their export plantations are exhausting and destroying their abundant lands in just a few centuries, and the communities around them are already hollowed out and abandoned.
Reminder that the US’s “victory gardens” became a necessity largely due to the mismanagement of the land Big Ag stole from Japanese farmers after pushing for their internment.
Japanese-American farmers were a huge presence on the pre-war West Coast, producing more than 40 percent of California’s commercial vegetable crop alone. A June 1942 federal report noted that “the Japanese people were the most important racial minority group engaged in agriculture in the Pacific Coast region. Their systems of farming, types of crops and land tenure conditions were such that their replacement by other farmers would be extremely difficult . . . . The average value per acre of all West Coast farms in 1940 was $37.94, whereas that of Japanese farms was $279.96 . . . . Three out of every four acres of Japanese farm lands were devoted to actual crop production, whereas only one out of every four acres of all farm land in the areas was planted in crops.”
Three out of every four acres of Japanese farm lands were devoted to actual crop production, whereas only one out of every four acres of all farm land in the areas was planted in crops."
I might just be stupid but I’ve read this sentence like 5 times and it still doesn’t make any sense to me. So 75% of the land was used to grow crops and 25% of the land was also used to grow crops?
i think it’s saying that japanese farms devoted 75% of their land base to crop production, but the overall average for the community farm land (including anglos) was only 25%. like anglos were wasting tons of space to conform to some typically dumb, capital intensive production system that ignores everything “marginal”. that’s my assumption and it totally doesn’t surprise me, but is very instructive.
more people can produce more food on less acres than the capital/energy intensive, highly mechanized systems. its like the most embarrassing and under appreciated statistic in settler ag systems. the unspoken part being that systems using a lot of human labor are unstable if not equitable. because theres all these able bodied people standing around with hand tools that might realize the “owner” or “overseer” provide no value. so settler ag systems rely extensively on slaves, penal systems, some defacto underclass of “guest”/seasonal workers on whatever process they can’t automate away all labor.
Reminder that the US’s “victory gardens” became a necessity largely due to the mismanagement of the land Big Ag stole from Japanese farmers after pushing for their internment.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180124152943/https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1992/02/02/bitter-harvest/c8389b23-884d-43bd-ad34-bf7b11077135/
I might just be stupid but I’ve read this sentence like 5 times and it still doesn’t make any sense to me. So 75% of the land was used to grow crops and 25% of the land was also used to grow crops?
i think it’s saying that japanese farms devoted 75% of their land base to crop production, but the overall average for the community farm land (including anglos) was only 25%. like anglos were wasting tons of space to conform to some typically dumb, capital intensive production system that ignores everything “marginal”. that’s my assumption and it totally doesn’t surprise me, but is very instructive.
more people can produce more food on less acres than the capital/energy intensive, highly mechanized systems. its like the most embarrassing and under appreciated statistic in settler ag systems. the unspoken part being that systems using a lot of human labor are unstable if not equitable. because theres all these able bodied people standing around with hand tools that might realize the “owner” or “overseer” provide no value. so settler ag systems rely extensively on slaves, penal systems, some defacto underclass of “guest”/seasonal workers on whatever process they can’t automate away all labor.