alt Hacker NewsWe are seeing an interesting limit in the food case though.
We increased production and needed fewer farmers, but we now have so few farmers that most people have very little idea of what food really is, where it comes from, or what it takes to run our food system.
Higher productivity is good to a point, but eventually it risks becoming too fragile.
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This doesn't sound like an accurate description of US agriculture. Just off the top of my head
* The US is not producing enough food - it's now a net food importer
* The increasing problems we are seeing in the food supply chain are usually tied to producers cutting costs and padding margins
Matt Stoller has gone into this at length - https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/is-america-losing-the-abi...
So I mean it could depend on your definition of productivity, if anything that increases shareholder returns at the expense of a good product or robust supply chain is considered more "productivity," sure. Just as monopolies are the most "productive" businesses ever for their shareholders, but generally awful for everyone else, and are not what most people would think of as productive.
The human definition of productivity is - less inputs producing more and better outputs.
The cartel doublespeak definition is - the product got worse and the margins improved, which seems to describe US Big Ag at present
100%. In fact, this exact scenario is playing out in the cattle industry.
Screwworm, a parasite that kills cattle in days is making a comeback. And we are less prepared for it this time because previously (the 1950s-1970s) we had a lot more labor in the industry to manually check each head of cattle. Bloomberg even called it out specifically.
Ranchers also said the screwworm would be much deadlier if it were to return, because of a lack of labor. “We can’t fight it like we did in the ’60s, we can’t go out and rope every head of cattle and put a smear on every open wound,” Schumann said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-02/deadly-sc...