Agriculture has become a industry of scale, but that might be it's undoing. It might be better to have an electric tractor doing the ploughing, but wouldn't it be even better to do less ploughing? With the invention of fertilizers (which isn't bad in itself) we where able to scale, but we needed more fertilizer, the soil became more barren and devoid of soil life with every iteration.

With heavier tractors we needed to lower the water level to not get stuck in the soft soils, the heavier tractors compacted the soils even more, so we needed heavier tractors to till en plough the soil again. Otherwise we couldn't force the same crop out of the soil year after year.

When we're only looking at the economic outcomes of the agronomic industry, we're forgetting a few things. I work in IT, I work at an environmental NGO, I have an interest in agroecology, organic farming and such but I often feel it's an 'either/or' kind of thing.

It's either locally sourced, community supported agriculture with a huge focus on soil restoration, resilience, crop rotation, diversity (polyculture? as opposite of monoculture) land access which attracts a specific crowd of people. Think leftist, anarchistic, community-oriented, spiritual-religious (which group I really like) but with a lot of menial/manual labor, a aversion of technology. Which can be explained by the centralistic nature of a lot of technology, and it often being focused on ‘vertical scaling’.

Or it’s hip startups with sensor tech, drones, AI-platforms predicting where you’ll have te best results and use for example ‘variable-rate seeding’ and program your fleet of heavy tractors to automate it all. We’ve automated quite a lot in ‘beef production’, but maybe we should do less of that and focus more on finding solutions to scale horizontally? (Like we might need less humongous farms producing one specific product but more smaller farms producing various products).

Hopefully this makes sense to someone ;)

I was born in 1986, so I don't have memories of the Cold War and such. In school we learn a lot about WWII, that 6 million jews died and such.

But halfway trough Germany started the wasteland. Our Reformed churches sends/sended/smuggled Bible translation to Moldavia, Ukraine, Russia. We donated money to help Hungarian Baptists, Ukrainian Jews and so on.. But that's it.

I've visited quite some 'Eastern European' countries, and when I do I always have to dive into the history. When visiting Krakow for a week I learned about Galicia (I thought it was weird to have a Jewish museum named after a Spanish region ;)).

So, in 2010 I decided to first visit all European countries, before flying somewhere else. I have rules, I have to have visited a bordering country before I'm allowed to visit a country. (E.g. can't go to Portugal I have to visit Spain first). And I have to stay in a country , so a train stop our toilet visit doesn't count for visiting Slovenia..

To know history to some extend, you have to be there. But, it's also around us. When being overwhelmed by the empty mezuzah spaces, I realized that my hometown only had a 'Synagoguestreet' without a synagogue. That we have Jewish cemeteries, but no burials, and that there almost no Jewish community in the Netherlands, while my late grandmother talked about Jewish shop owners ..

I was born in 1986, so I don't have memories of the Cold War and such. In school we learn a lot about WWII, that 6 million jews died and such.

But halfway trough Germany started the wasteland. Our Reformed churches sends/sended/smuggled Bible translation to Moldavia, Ukraine, Russia. We donated money to help Hungarian Baptists, Ukrainian Jews and so on.. But that's it.

I've visited quite some 'Eastern European' countries, and when I do I always have to dive into the history. When visiting Krakow for a week I learned about Galicia (I thought it was weird to have a Jewish museum named after a Spanish region ;)).

So, in 2010 I decided to first visit all European countries, before flying somewhere else. I have rules, I have to have visited a bordering country before I'm allowed to visit a country. (E.g. can't go to Portugal I have to visit Spain first). And I have to stay in a country , so a train stop our toilet visit doesn't count for visiting Slovenia..

To know history to some extend, you have to be there. But, it's also around us. When being overwhelmed by the empty mspaces

Somewhere in there maybe is a different idea about 'tolerance'. The first might have a 'Live and let live'-position. The other actually believes plurality of lifestyles is a good thing. Somewhere along those lines ;)

Making a specific amount of hours or working hard doesn't cause burnout most of the time.

The whole randstad area (near the coast, with all the major cities) has more jobs, wealth, opportunities and such..