As a child, I grew up in a village in China and our family farmed rice. It was mostly my mom who was doing the farming while my dad worked in the city.
Some things I remember:
* Seeing hired buffalos tilling our fields
* Playing with frogs and catching tadpoles in the fields
* Someone with a machine that removes the husks would come to our village during harvest
* The smell of rice fields. I recently smelled it again and it's very comforting.
Now I work in high tech, working on AI, and the fancy stuff. There is just something about rice fields that I love - maybe just memories, childhood, smell, how serene it looks when it's full.
My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places. When I was younger, I used envy those who grew up privileged in a big modern city. Nowadays, I absolutely am glad I grew up in a little village in a farming community and I consider myself lucky to have.
I grew up in a similar environment, similar trajectory, but in Africa.
Dad was a teacher in a rural school, mum stayed at home.
Until I went to school I would stay outside all day with my friends, playing in and around the rivers and dams, making our own fun with abandoned cars and rusted out farming equipment.
Our school had one computer, and I was lucky enough to get to use it after hours from time to time.
I would study the manual from front to back so I could optimise my time while on the computer.
Practiced typing on a typewriter to type in code listings faster later (aging myself here ;)
Today I build AI agents and infrastructure to run them for a hyperscaler, and my car drives me around. Feels like another lifetime ago.
This is rural Scotland in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
I'd like my small son to have the same opportunities that I had, instead of a school where the playground has lots of very carefully manufactured play equipment and they get to sit and look at iPads instead of working out for themselves how to program a BBC Micro.
>My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places
Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago
> The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car.
I grew up in similar environment in rural central India and I (half)jokingly say farming was my first real job. We rarely planted rice, but I have vivid memory of helping my father plant the rice saplings in the muddy puddles in my farm.
I am always skeptical of urban people wanting to move back to little villages to do farming. Farming is a back-breaking and a tough job. You are exposed to all the vagaries of nature. The market forces are also not always in your favour. It is another version of "quit-job-and-open-a-coffee-shop" fallacy.
Well, those who quit their jobs and open coffee shops almost certainly make a bad choice for themselves economically and work/ life balance wise... But they do wonderful things for their community, and - a questionable benefit to society but a huge benefit to some - real estate prices. People love these places. They capture a tiny fraction of the value they create, if we look at it in cold terms.
That can't really be said for downscaling rice farmers, can it? I mean, at best maybe the other rice farmers enjoy having them around.
I meant it as a pipe-dream that people jump into without knowing the hidden asymmetries. Farming of any kind is hard and learning that specific skillset is necessary to succeed.
> My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places.
Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans, and it could still remain easy accessible from the city for recreational purposes.
The solarpunk ideal of living a rural life requires more road infrastructure, which cuts off wildlife routes and natural drainage, and even with EVs, still pollutes the air from tire wear.
That is my understanding too, but many people equate rural life with „natural“. Unfortunately the rural environment is all but natural. The cultural landscape that has been engineered over centuries all but displaced true wilderness and is largely devoid of biodiversity. The better we become at industrial agriculture, the worse the situation is.
That depends on the rural environment. Especially grazing lands, like north European coastal heathlands, may have been managed with controlled burns in between grazing for a thousand years, to the point that they have their own biodiversity, that may get lost if they are disused.
We've already touched ~all of the arable and non-arable land that's near to where people want to live. Forests clearcut, swamps (and deltas and the Netherlands) drained, rivers rerouted, reservoirs established, plains tilled, roads built, mountains conquered: We've been shaping and expanding the habitable Earth as it suits us for a very long time.
We're humans. We do that stuff.
And we're natural creatures like the rest of them are.
It would also be better for the earth if there were no cities and everyone went back to village farming and local communities. I also don't see that ever happening nor do I want to ive in a city.
A very large fraction of land (~50%) is currently used to grow biomass to feed 8 billion humans. Nothing about that land is 'natural' - it's a carefully engineered environment that's quite hostile to animal life.
The land that people live on, whether it's in a city, a suburb, or in a rural manner is a rounding error compared to those demands.
Farms - with a near infinitesimal number of farmers compared to the numbers living in cities .. exactly as things are trending now.
It's common enough, here at least, to have a small family cropping 13,000 old school acres - tilling, seeding, waiting, harvesting, etc with big machines and Ag-bots.
If you're going to live underground(and you'd have to on Mars) you might as well do it here, at the bottom of the ocean, or if you're feeling particularily ambitious - even on the moon. There is literally zero advantage to doing it on Mars, except for the achievement.
I grew up in North India, close to Ramganga river (Jim Corbet park is on this river). We grew rice in addition to sugar cane.
The smell of paddy (and also of large quantity of cooked rice) is absolutely soothing for me and it brings back memory.
During my grandfather time, it was very common for a crab to grab your fingers when you are planting the paddy. My father would chase turtles and large frogs when he was a kid.
When I was a kid, the crabs and turtles were gone but frogs were pretty abundant. In last twenty years, there are hardly any frogs left. Earthworms are also under stress.
The Japanese style of planting paddy wasn't very common in India before green revolution. Then we had a some new varieties that took over almost all old varieties for a simple reason for yield. My grandmother used to complain about a lost variety a lot. Apparently it had such a strong aroma that whole village would know what rice you have cooked. Glad to see more efforts preserving old varieties [1].
This is so important. Kerala in particular had a treasure trove of varieties, some well suited to low rainfall, resistant to local pests. I am sure other states had/has such diversity too, I am just not knowledgeable enough.
These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-cropping. The government is doing nothing about it.
I was at my wife's hometown for CNY and it seems her mother still does everything by hand. Pretty impressive... not sure how long I'd last doing that kind of hard labor. It does smell nice.
Yea that rice mill machine is similar to what I remember. Our village didn't have one so some guy would show up in harvest season to do it for every house in the village.
I can tell by the houses in your wife's village that their area was likely wealthier than ours growing up. Our houses looked more like this: https://imgur.com/a/Pc9LuKF
When I was a kid, it felt like there were only 2 or 3 villages total in my area since our parents didn't allow us to go too far. As a visiting adult, I found out that there were hundreds of similar villages in the region. Most of these villages are generally empty nowadays as people moved to cities. However, I heard from locals that some younger people are beginning to return to villages and raise their kids there.
I believe it's pretty quiet here too outside of CNY, although there is at least one active school nearby. Nice to hear some younger people are returning. It must be nice for kids to grow up in this kind of environment.
Is this the “city experience” in general or specifically for the United States? It famously has very poor urbanism so might not mean the same as in Europe for example.
I have grown up in rural Russia in the 80s and that was also similar - a forest started 50m from our house and I would just get lost there from time to time - not fun for my parents but magical for me.
Then we moved to the middle of a European capital city (Sofia) and I _still_ had almost a forest right next to the apartment block we used to live in - enough of a forest that as a 10yo kid I could find a nook to build myself a small hut with a burning fireplace inside it and nobody complained.
There are plenty of big European cities that are 10-20mins short unsupervised trip to a wilderness that a kid can do.
For example - Valencia has an uninterrupted bicycle highway that gets you from the city center to a wilderness preserve and a beach in less than an hour cycling.
To me all of these nature vs city laments are just US car dependency. Cities don’t have to be this way at all.
A lot of areas in Western Europe are either completely deforested or have very weird low-density half-dead wooded areas, especially Germany. One has to go all the way to Poland/Serbia/Bulgaria to get a real forest experience again.
I think that's a profoundly balanced perspective on a possible future wherein automation has successfully dealt with most of the mundanities of producing the things we need to live and enjoy life.
It allows for supremely-intense end-game levels of automation, and also for personal productivity and a resulting increased joy, and for at least some aspects of free market economics to all work together.
I don't necessarily think everyone should move out of cities to go back to living in rural areas and villages. I want it so that living outside of the city more viable than it is today because there are very real benefits to living there.
In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society. This just didn't happen when I was growing up in a village. There is a joke that Asian parents don't think depression exists. I think part of that mindset is rooted in how many of them grew up - depression was just not really a thing in a village.
I sometimes hear of people who try to move to the country side, only to hate it and want to move back to cities. I get it. It's not for everyone. But I think it can be aided with technology such as AI+robots helping with your farms or house work, self driving cars taking your kids to school a bit far away, AI doctors who can do most of the basic healthcare work, etc. And if you can build a business with 1 or 2 people + AI, then it also makes remote work more viable. Basically, I think tech can bring a lot of the city quality of life to the country side.
If kids want to move to a town/city for more opportunities or networking, they'd be free to do so when they're older. Most do. But right now, the cities seem like the only path to having a decent quality of life.
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
That just means we need to structure cities differently.
I live in a 1 sq km neighbourhood (literally, 1 km square) that houses 10k people.
It has almost everything I could wish for at walkable distance, schools for all ages, parks, a gym, a pool, sports campgrounds, medics, pharmacies, stores, markets, etc.
What doesn't exist (e.g. a movie theater, a library) I can reach by public transit in half an hour. The city has 2M people, there's plenty of stuff to do.
I've lived here all my life, my kids go to school with the kids of my school mates. They walk to school from at least 10yo, they visit each other's houses. During school breaks and weekends, they play in the park with their school friends while their parents grab a beer in a nearby kiosk.
You can build communities like this within cities.
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely.
In Japan that's true in a lot of city neighbourhoods as well. The high trust is extremely valuable but villages are not the only way to achieve it.
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone.
I never felt unsafe as a kid or abused in any way although my mom would make me memorize our village's name and location in case I get abducted while playing with my friends. We'd often go over to neighboring villages to play because some of our friends from school lived in a different village. We played until dawn and then went home to have dinner.
Cars in rural settings are generally faster and more indispensable for their owners. It is much easier to enact policy that reduces car traffic in cities than in villages.
It makes a pretty big difference. Yes, the opportunities in the city are bigger for everything, but so are the dangers. The amount of crazy people. The effort involved in getting to a nice and safe place where the kids can just run around without you having to watch them every second. Those places also exist in some cities, but way too few. So great that you don't have a car, (I mean it) car free places in cities I do enjoy, there are just not many of them.
I have two three year olds. Parks where they can run around with relaxed supervision are not far. A big park is close enough that they can walk the distance and in less than half an hour by bike we can reach a forest and four or five other parks.
> Doing a day of manual labour, chatting shit, then going for the onsen and some BBQ and beers is far better than grinding away at some enterprise SaaS that will probably disappear in a few years.
I particularly agree with this statement.
I don't know why manual work has been so denigrated over the last century. We believed that office labor was more important and healthier than manual labor. I don't think so.
As a developer, sitting all day typing in a stuffy office, without natural light, without sun, without air, is certainly no healthier than being outdoors, connecting with nature and other people. We come from nature and are made to be active, outdoors, and in the sunlight.
Today, with AI, many white-collar jobs are being called into question, and perhaps we can go back to loving certain traditional jobs.
The push to increase production and leave nothing on the table is insidious and will turn every work environment, be it manual labor, design, programming or excel factory into shit.
You'll end up burn out and hating the job (no matter the job) if the company you work for doesn't give a considerable weight to the wellbeing of employees (at the percieved cost of productivity and raw revenue).
I’d love to do manual labor as long as: I have a decent house, decent health insurance, can afford decent food/stuff, can afford taking sabbaticals, can afford getting sick and not losing my income, can afford decent education for kids, etc.
Unfortunately, many of us are chained to the modern way of life.
Don’t forget doing only enough manual labour not to get hurt, killed or develop a chronic condition.
You can make a lot of money doing many skilled manual jobs in my country. Trades are highly paid and there is not enough supply. Better money than software development.
They often wreck their backs, or develop other chronic conditions. The successful ones stop doing manual work by the time they are in their 40s and move to running their own businesses employing 20 year olds.
A friend of mine just lost a family member a few weeks ago. He slipped on a roof.
I hear sentiments about farming from lots of burnout software developers.
I always wonder what made them become developers at all. Cause my primary motivation for selecting a job was that I explicitly didn't want to ever work manually, I knew that since early childhood and it still didn't change even after 2 burnouts. My secondary motivation was that I liked working with machinery/computers.
Also when I started coding, it immediately felt like my passion. And the thing I love most about coding is that mostly all changes I make have instantly visible results. I couldn't imagine working a job where I had to plant a seed and then wait a week to see if it sprouts.
Also what I love about development is that with modern Docker/Kubernetes setups you can make the environment where your code runs pretty predictable. And with proper backups configured and backup restore testing you aren't really worried about losing the stuff you worked on for months. Meanwhile while farming you can't predict how much sun is gonna shine or how much rain you're gonna get. And you can't prepare for natural disasters which can come anytime and ruin your crops.
So I wonder if it's all just people who never loved software engineering and just went into it for money, and now that they have money after years of working they start looking for their true passion.
As someone producing food, it’s pretty much a given that something in nature will seek to consume what you are producing. I was waiting for it, and in this case, wild boar.
It is probably a nice experience to have, but imagine your body after doing this for 50-60 years. You're one serious back injury away from being unemployed.
I and my wife live in the city for work. While most people flock to the city and settle there as an upgraded life, we always felt empty here. Our dream is to buy a piece of land at our village and come back to our roots. I dont enjoy farming that much but my wife does. I however like the bliss of living close to nature. There is a river that flows nearby and taking a dip in that fills me with so much joy that I could never find anywhere in the city.
> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat.
Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.
I think Japanese rice-centric framing of meals is also of note, it's not universal across East Asia - I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China, but it's just a menu item in Japan.
Corn??? I don't think corn in bulk is cheaply available in Japan at all. There's a mention in Wikipedia of a Chinese-Mongolian corn meal porridge thing but it looks pretty local.
If you go into a Chinese supermarket, it will quickly become apparent that the default cooking oil is corn oil.
I find this an interesting contrast with the United States, where the default cooking oil is Canola oil (if you're a person looking to cook your own food; this is the sense in which the Chinese default is corn oil) or soybean oil (if you're a company looking to sell packaged food in grocery stores). As far as I'm aware, traditional China would have had sesame oil and maybe soybean oil, and certainly not corn oil. The advantage of corn oil must be the price.
But if corn oil is so cheap, why does the cheapest oil available in the US seem to be soybean oil?
I was prepared to be dissapointed, but I am not.
Honest, simple, carrys that sense of work is good and doing what needs to be done is enough and that you are just another critter.
This was mostly a nice read, I do enjoy these kinds of slice-of-life blogs. I think it might have been a bit better without making claims about the economic future and history of rice farming or whatever, if the author doesn't even speak the language it's unlikely they have any real insight to offer and whatever shallow information they got off a random Youtube video is liable to be spreading misinformation that misleads uninformed readers than being actually informative. Farming a rice field does not a rice economist make.
There is one particularly funny point I'd quibble on:
> This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work the fields would be forced into renting.
I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).
I am, of course, nitpicking. It's rather easier for me to write comments complaining about things than praising them at length, but I was entertained by the view into the author's experiences and anecdotes.
One thing that’s worth noting though is that Japan is known for having a large degree of small business ownership, and it’s also a pretty well documented effect that high rates of small business ownership = high rates of support for capitalism, because small business owners themselves get a taste of capitalism and see it’s benefits.
The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt. It's not dissimilar to pre-1929 kulaks, though the kulaks were encouraged/enabled to become a relatively wealthy/middle class peasantry who employed people and were directly involved in the production without owning large swathes of land, acting as a kind of a social dampener against a revolution.
Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.
Kulaks were the stated problem, the real problem were the middling farmers. If you're a smallholder with a surplus of land, your production is very elastic.
You can plant cash crops and sell them to buy industrial products. Or you can plant crops that boost your quality of life directly: fruit, vegetables, tobacco, animal fodder.
The "price scissors" (low price of wheat, high price of goods) meant that middling farmers stopped planting wheat that the USSR needed to feed the cities and to pay for imports. To make the peasants plant wheat again the Soviets took away their land in the name of economy of scale (collectivization), but the real goal was to limit the size of personal plots.
> The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt.
So, it was an anti-revolutionary policy. Which at that time of history worked as well as an anti-communist policy.
> Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.
Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.
It's important for me to use words precisely. If somebody implies, for example, that capitalism is the opposite of communism, that's just snatching the words and waving them like banners.
The non-oral version of the explanation author received is likely 農地解放, a postwar US/Allied military led land reform.
The core idea of it, I think, is that those landlords must have been the mainsails of prewar Japanese military dictatorship regime and its expansionism under the strong leadership of its emperor, and breaking up land ownership will make it complicated for Japan to re-consolidate power and/or to somehow become closer to the Soviets.
I guess it did serve its core purpose of keeping China/Russia at bay, considering Japan has been extraordinary antagonistic to neighboring, and/or openly communist and/or totalitarian regimes, despite running on a rather ethnocentric communism-from-first-principle political system...
You have to remember that in 1950, the US had a tremendous influence in Japan, to put it mildly, and also in 1950, the US was rabidly, performatively anti-communist. When McCarthyism was getting started stateside, we were also carrying out a "Red Purge" in Japan.
Anyway, yeah, in this context, Japan passed the Agricultural Land Act of 1952, which was intended to turn land owned by a few rich landlords into small, independently owned private farms. That may sound like the opposite of capitalism, and it is, but as I understand it, the idea was to turn what were basically serfs into a proper middle class, by redistributing the wealth and means of production directly down to them, which would then prevent communism from being as appealing. I don't know about the logic, but I guess it worked, since Japan isn't communist?
The communist policy everywhere was to rob the small farmers and small business owners of everything they owned and force them to become quasi-serfs.
The socialist/communist economy is the final extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, towards which USA and other Western countries have been continuously evolving during the last quarter of century. The economy of USA in 2026 is much more similar to the economy of one of the former socialist countries in 1976 than it resembles the economy of USA in 1976.
Small farmers and businessmen were the main enemies of communism, everywhere.
So what Japan enacted was indeed a good anti-communist policy.
Fighting against big companies and supporting small businesses is the opposite of communist policies.
There were a lot of great differences between true communism and what the communists themselves claimed communism to be. There were also a lot of great differences between true communism and what communism has been claimed to be in USA.
Source: I have grown up in a country occupied by communist invaders, so I know what true communism is.
> I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).
You are meant to "own the means of production" not in an actual, but more ideal sense. Owning a farm or workshop to the exclusion of other people makes you petit bourgeois and this is bad. Communism promotes collective farms. AFAIK Poland was the only European Eastern Bloc country to tolerate small private farms, as a concession to obstinate peasants after the death of Stalin.
Promoting small individual farms is a more Georgist, populist capitalist or possibly strictly conservative policy. Not speaking to its economic sense though.
> to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature
War is peace,
Freedom is slavery,
Ignorance is strength
The point, as I see it, being that politicians like to make contradicting statements. Good for sales you could say. It is possible to cut through such lies by using logic, good on you for doing that. Unfortunately, many people take such statements as true and mostly get confused by it.
That doesn't seem strange to me at all. You give the people some of the things that they want from communism so that they will be content without communism. It's exactly what Bismarck did in Germany around 1900 (unemployment benefits, retirement funds and health insurance) and it was widely considered a success. Perhaps that was even an inspiration for Japan
As a child, I grew up in a village in China and our family farmed rice. It was mostly my mom who was doing the farming while my dad worked in the city.
Some things I remember:
* Seeing hired buffalos tilling our fields
* Playing with frogs and catching tadpoles in the fields
* Someone with a machine that removes the husks would come to our village during harvest
* The smell of rice fields. I recently smelled it again and it's very comforting.
Now I work in high tech, working on AI, and the fancy stuff. There is just something about rice fields that I love - maybe just memories, childhood, smell, how serene it looks when it's full.
My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places. When I was younger, I used envy those who grew up privileged in a big modern city. Nowadays, I absolutely am glad I grew up in a little village in a farming community and I consider myself lucky to have.
I grew up in a similar environment, similar trajectory, but in Africa.
Dad was a teacher in a rural school, mum stayed at home.
Until I went to school I would stay outside all day with my friends, playing in and around the rivers and dams, making our own fun with abandoned cars and rusted out farming equipment.
Our school had one computer, and I was lucky enough to get to use it after hours from time to time.
I would study the manual from front to back so I could optimise my time while on the computer.
Practiced typing on a typewriter to type in code listings faster later (aging myself here ;)
Today I build AI agents and infrastructure to run them for a hyperscaler, and my car drives me around. Feels like another lifetime ago.
This is rural Scotland in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
I'd like my small son to have the same opportunities that I had, instead of a school where the playground has lots of very carefully manufactured play equipment and they get to sit and look at iPads instead of working out for themselves how to program a BBC Micro.
>My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places
Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago
> The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car.
I grew up in similar environment in rural central India and I (half)jokingly say farming was my first real job. We rarely planted rice, but I have vivid memory of helping my father plant the rice saplings in the muddy puddles in my farm.
I am always skeptical of urban people wanting to move back to little villages to do farming. Farming is a back-breaking and a tough job. You are exposed to all the vagaries of nature. The market forces are also not always in your favour. It is another version of "quit-job-and-open-a-coffee-shop" fallacy.
Well, those who quit their jobs and open coffee shops almost certainly make a bad choice for themselves economically and work/ life balance wise... But they do wonderful things for their community, and - a questionable benefit to society but a huge benefit to some - real estate prices. People love these places. They capture a tiny fraction of the value they create, if we look at it in cold terms.
That can't really be said for downscaling rice farmers, can it? I mean, at best maybe the other rice farmers enjoy having them around.
I meant it as a pipe-dream that people jump into without knowing the hidden asymmetries. Farming of any kind is hard and learning that specific skillset is necessary to succeed.
> My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places.
Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans, and it could still remain easy accessible from the city for recreational purposes.
The solarpunk ideal of living a rural life requires more road infrastructure, which cuts off wildlife routes and natural drainage, and even with EVs, still pollutes the air from tire wear.
That is my understanding too, but many people equate rural life with „natural“. Unfortunately the rural environment is all but natural. The cultural landscape that has been engineered over centuries all but displaced true wilderness and is largely devoid of biodiversity. The better we become at industrial agriculture, the worse the situation is.
That depends on the rural environment. Especially grazing lands, like north European coastal heathlands, may have been managed with controlled burns in between grazing for a thousand years, to the point that they have their own biodiversity, that may get lost if they are disused.
Not everywhere, you are looking at only suburbs vs cities.
We've already touched ~all of the arable and non-arable land that's near to where people want to live. Forests clearcut, swamps (and deltas and the Netherlands) drained, rivers rerouted, reservoirs established, plains tilled, roads built, mountains conquered: We've been shaping and expanding the habitable Earth as it suits us for a very long time.
We're humans. We do that stuff.
And we're natural creatures like the rest of them are.
It would also be better for the earth if there were no cities and everyone went back to village farming and local communities. I also don't see that ever happening nor do I want to ive in a city.
A very large fraction of land (~50%) is currently used to grow biomass to feed 8 billion humans. Nothing about that land is 'natural' - it's a carefully engineered environment that's quite hostile to animal life.
The land that people live on, whether it's in a city, a suburb, or in a rural manner is a rounding error compared to those demands.
This only looks at land mammals rather than plant crops, but...
https://xkcd.com/1338/
> Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans
Where's the food going to come from?
Farms - with a near infinitesimal number of farmers compared to the numbers living in cities .. exactly as things are trending now.
It's common enough, here at least, to have a small family cropping 13,000 old school acres - tilling, seeding, waiting, harvesting, etc with big machines and Ag-bots.
eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpNMSSGWnOI
And the best way for Earth is we all migrate to Mars aboard Elon Musk's spaceship.
If you're going to live underground(and you'd have to on Mars) you might as well do it here, at the bottom of the ocean, or if you're feeling particularily ambitious - even on the moon. There is literally zero advantage to doing it on Mars, except for the achievement.
I grew up in North India, close to Ramganga river (Jim Corbet park is on this river). We grew rice in addition to sugar cane.
The smell of paddy (and also of large quantity of cooked rice) is absolutely soothing for me and it brings back memory.
During my grandfather time, it was very common for a crab to grab your fingers when you are planting the paddy. My father would chase turtles and large frogs when he was a kid.
When I was a kid, the crabs and turtles were gone but frogs were pretty abundant. In last twenty years, there are hardly any frogs left. Earthworms are also under stress.
The Japanese style of planting paddy wasn't very common in India before green revolution. Then we had a some new varieties that took over almost all old varieties for a simple reason for yield. My grandmother used to complain about a lost variety a lot. Apparently it had such a strong aroma that whole village would know what rice you have cooked. Glad to see more efforts preserving old varieties [1].
[1] https://ruralindiaonline.org/article/let-them-eat-rice
Honestly the rice varieties in India should be promoted and protected more. The diversity and health benefits of these varieties is immense.
This is so important. Kerala in particular had a treasure trove of varieties, some well suited to low rainfall, resistant to local pests. I am sure other states had/has such diversity too, I am just not knowledgeable enough.
These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-cropping. The government is doing nothing about it.
I was at my wife's hometown for CNY and it seems her mother still does everything by hand. Pretty impressive... not sure how long I'd last doing that kind of hard labor. It does smell nice.
https://gist.github.com/olalonde/8a905bcd87e3bfcd4f6143a337e...
Yea that rice mill machine is similar to what I remember. Our village didn't have one so some guy would show up in harvest season to do it for every house in the village.
I can tell by the houses in your wife's village that their area was likely wealthier than ours growing up. Our houses looked more like this: https://imgur.com/a/Pc9LuKF
When I was a kid, it felt like there were only 2 or 3 villages total in my area since our parents didn't allow us to go too far. As a visiting adult, I found out that there were hundreds of similar villages in the region. Most of these villages are generally empty nowadays as people moved to cities. However, I heard from locals that some younger people are beginning to return to villages and raise their kids there.
Oh, I assumed you meant a powered machine.
I believe it's pretty quiet here too outside of CNY, although there is at least one active school nearby. Nice to hear some younger people are returning. It must be nice for kids to grow up in this kind of environment.
Is this the “city experience” in general or specifically for the United States? It famously has very poor urbanism so might not mean the same as in Europe for example.
I have grown up in rural Russia in the 80s and that was also similar - a forest started 50m from our house and I would just get lost there from time to time - not fun for my parents but magical for me.
Then we moved to the middle of a European capital city (Sofia) and I _still_ had almost a forest right next to the apartment block we used to live in - enough of a forest that as a 10yo kid I could find a nook to build myself a small hut with a burning fireplace inside it and nobody complained.
There are plenty of big European cities that are 10-20mins short unsupervised trip to a wilderness that a kid can do.
For example - Valencia has an uninterrupted bicycle highway that gets you from the city center to a wilderness preserve and a beach in less than an hour cycling.
To me all of these nature vs city laments are just US car dependency. Cities don’t have to be this way at all.
A lot of areas in Western Europe are either completely deforested or have very weird low-density half-dead wooded areas, especially Germany. One has to go all the way to Poland/Serbia/Bulgaria to get a real forest experience again.
I think that's a profoundly balanced perspective on a possible future wherein automation has successfully dealt with most of the mundanities of producing the things we need to live and enjoy life.
It allows for supremely-intense end-game levels of automation, and also for personal productivity and a resulting increased joy, and for at least some aspects of free market economics to all work together.
(Can it happen? Perhaps we'll find out.)
> My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places.
Why? Honest question.
A kid in a town/city has access to a billion opportunities many of which exist only because there are enough people interested.
In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society. This just didn't happen when I was growing up in a village. There is a joke that Asian parents don't think depression exists. I think part of that mindset is rooted in how many of them grew up - depression was just not really a thing in a village.
I sometimes hear of people who try to move to the country side, only to hate it and want to move back to cities. I get it. It's not for everyone. But I think it can be aided with technology such as AI+robots helping with your farms or house work, self driving cars taking your kids to school a bit far away, AI doctors who can do most of the basic healthcare work, etc. And if you can build a business with 1 or 2 people + AI, then it also makes remote work more viable. Basically, I think tech can bring a lot of the city quality of life to the country side.
If kids want to move to a town/city for more opportunities or networking, they'd be free to do so when they're older. Most do. But right now, the cities seem like the only path to having a decent quality of life.
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
That just means we need to structure cities differently.
I live in a 1 sq km neighbourhood (literally, 1 km square) that houses 10k people.
It has almost everything I could wish for at walkable distance, schools for all ages, parks, a gym, a pool, sports campgrounds, medics, pharmacies, stores, markets, etc.
What doesn't exist (e.g. a movie theater, a library) I can reach by public transit in half an hour. The city has 2M people, there's plenty of stuff to do.
I've lived here all my life, my kids go to school with the kids of my school mates. They walk to school from at least 10yo, they visit each other's houses. During school breaks and weekends, they play in the park with their school friends while their parents grab a beer in a nearby kiosk.
You can build communities like this within cities.
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely.
In Japan that's true in a lot of city neighbourhoods as well. The high trust is extremely valuable but villages are not the only way to achieve it.
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone.
Seems like a recipe for rampant child abuse.
I never felt unsafe as a kid or abused in any way although my mom would make me memorize our village's name and location in case I get abducted while playing with my friends. We'd often go over to neighboring villages to play because some of our friends from school lived in a different village. We played until dawn and then went home to have dinner.
Doesn't happen that much. Possibly the environment in which people grow up in is so free and kind. Sort of like Hawaii's aloha spirit (search it up).
"A kid in a town/city has access to a billion opportunities many of which exist only because there are enough people interested."
Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car.
Cars in rural settings are generally faster and more indispensable for their owners. It is much easier to enact policy that reduces car traffic in cities than in villages.
I see. Have you lived with kids in a village and also in cities to see the difference in reality?
I did and am moving back to the village now.
I grew up in a city and my wife grew up in a village. We now live in a city and don’t own a car.
But you don't have kids yet?
It makes a pretty big difference. Yes, the opportunities in the city are bigger for everything, but so are the dangers. The amount of crazy people. The effort involved in getting to a nice and safe place where the kids can just run around without you having to watch them every second. Those places also exist in some cities, but way too few. So great that you don't have a car, (I mean it) car free places in cities I do enjoy, there are just not many of them.
I have two three year olds. Parks where they can run around with relaxed supervision are not far. A big park is close enough that they can walk the distance and in less than half an hour by bike we can reach a forest and four or five other parks.
> Doing a day of manual labour, chatting shit, then going for the onsen and some BBQ and beers is far better than grinding away at some enterprise SaaS that will probably disappear in a few years.
I particularly agree with this statement.
I don't know why manual work has been so denigrated over the last century. We believed that office labor was more important and healthier than manual labor. I don't think so.
As a developer, sitting all day typing in a stuffy office, without natural light, without sun, without air, is certainly no healthier than being outdoors, connecting with nature and other people. We come from nature and are made to be active, outdoors, and in the sunlight.
Today, with AI, many white-collar jobs are being called into question, and perhaps we can go back to loving certain traditional jobs.
The push to increase production and leave nothing on the table is insidious and will turn every work environment, be it manual labor, design, programming or excel factory into shit.
You'll end up burn out and hating the job (no matter the job) if the company you work for doesn't give a considerable weight to the wellbeing of employees (at the percieved cost of productivity and raw revenue).
I’d love to do manual labor as long as: I have a decent house, decent health insurance, can afford decent food/stuff, can afford taking sabbaticals, can afford getting sick and not losing my income, can afford decent education for kids, etc.
Unfortunately, many of us are chained to the modern way of life.
Don’t forget doing only enough manual labour not to get hurt, killed or develop a chronic condition.
You can make a lot of money doing many skilled manual jobs in my country. Trades are highly paid and there is not enough supply. Better money than software development.
They often wreck their backs, or develop other chronic conditions. The successful ones stop doing manual work by the time they are in their 40s and move to running their own businesses employing 20 year olds.
A friend of mine just lost a family member a few weeks ago. He slipped on a roof.
@sdevonoes What do you do for work?
ps: Unfortunately I agree with you.
I hear sentiments about farming from lots of burnout software developers.
I always wonder what made them become developers at all. Cause my primary motivation for selecting a job was that I explicitly didn't want to ever work manually, I knew that since early childhood and it still didn't change even after 2 burnouts. My secondary motivation was that I liked working with machinery/computers.
Also when I started coding, it immediately felt like my passion. And the thing I love most about coding is that mostly all changes I make have instantly visible results. I couldn't imagine working a job where I had to plant a seed and then wait a week to see if it sprouts.
Also what I love about development is that with modern Docker/Kubernetes setups you can make the environment where your code runs pretty predictable. And with proper backups configured and backup restore testing you aren't really worried about losing the stuff you worked on for months. Meanwhile while farming you can't predict how much sun is gonna shine or how much rain you're gonna get. And you can't prepare for natural disasters which can come anytime and ruin your crops.
So I wonder if it's all just people who never loved software engineering and just went into it for money, and now that they have money after years of working they start looking for their true passion.
As someone producing food, it’s pretty much a given that something in nature will seek to consume what you are producing. I was waiting for it, and in this case, wild boar.
It is probably a nice experience to have, but imagine your body after doing this for 50-60 years. You're one serious back injury away from being unemployed.
Much like carpentry, or electrical work, or concrete, or just about any of the trades.
Any labor throughout human history.
If ypu do those for 15 years you are likely in management
I and my wife live in the city for work. While most people flock to the city and settle there as an upgraded life, we always felt empty here. Our dream is to buy a piece of land at our village and come back to our roots. I dont enjoy farming that much but my wife does. I however like the bliss of living close to nature. There is a river that flows nearby and taking a dip in that fills me with so much joy that I could never find anywhere in the city.
That suitcase of rice story though, I'm finding it problematic lol.
- First of all a 95% increase in the price of rice means it less than doubled which is no big deal.
- I think maybe you meant it 20x'ed ? If so I will just eat corn until it comes down (my house eats 100kg of rice in a month)
- Can a suitcase of rice even get through customs?
Indeed it's a roughly 2x increase (5kg supermarket bag from 2000 jpy to 4000).
Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat.
Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.
I think Japanese rice-centric framing of meals is also of note, it's not universal across East Asia - I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China, but it's just a menu item in Japan.
> I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China
I can't personally attest to that, but it certainly makes sense. Rice meals vs noodle meals are a fairly fundamental split in Chinese cuisine.
(It doesn't make rice any less of a staple food.)
Corn is still cheaper. If you're really poor in Asia you're eating corn (and complaining about it).
Corn??? I don't think corn in bulk is cheaply available in Japan at all. There's a mention in Wikipedia of a Chinese-Mongolian corn meal porridge thing but it looks pretty local.
It's available but it's culturally considered a grain that you feed to livestock rather than humans. I mostly feel the same way about it TBH.
If you go into a Chinese supermarket, it will quickly become apparent that the default cooking oil is corn oil.
I find this an interesting contrast with the United States, where the default cooking oil is Canola oil (if you're a person looking to cook your own food; this is the sense in which the Chinese default is corn oil) or soybean oil (if you're a company looking to sell packaged food in grocery stores). As far as I'm aware, traditional China would have had sesame oil and maybe soybean oil, and certainly not corn oil. The advantage of corn oil must be the price.
But if corn oil is so cheap, why does the cheapest oil available in the US seem to be soybean oil?
> my house eats 100kg of rice in a month
What’s the maths on that? A cup of rice would seem a fair bit for a person for a meal. A cup is about 200g.
That’s 500 portions a month. 5.5 people for 3 meals a day?
A lot of Asian households are multi-generational, so the maths definitely checks out there.
I'm putting my money on more people (8-10) but eating less than 200g per meal (1/2 cup uncooked, ~100g for most people)
EDIT, just saw sibling, that's impressive for 5 people, unless the dogs eat a lot of rice too.
It fluctuates but on average maybe 5 humans and 10 dogs.
You give rice to the dogs, too?
That’s an amazing volume.
I was prepared to be dissapointed, but I am not. Honest, simple, carrys that sense of work is good and doing what needs to be done is enough and that you are just another critter.
This was mostly a nice read, I do enjoy these kinds of slice-of-life blogs. I think it might have been a bit better without making claims about the economic future and history of rice farming or whatever, if the author doesn't even speak the language it's unlikely they have any real insight to offer and whatever shallow information they got off a random Youtube video is liable to be spreading misinformation that misleads uninformed readers than being actually informative. Farming a rice field does not a rice economist make.
There is one particularly funny point I'd quibble on:
> This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work the fields would be forced into renting.
I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).
I am, of course, nitpicking. It's rather easier for me to write comments complaining about things than praising them at length, but I was entertained by the view into the author's experiences and anecdotes.
One thing that’s worth noting though is that Japan is known for having a large degree of small business ownership, and it’s also a pretty well documented effect that high rates of small business ownership = high rates of support for capitalism, because small business owners themselves get a taste of capitalism and see it’s benefits.
It's true, every small business owner enjoys larping as a capitalist until it comes time to declare bankruptcy https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/coronavirus/assistan...
How is that communistic?
The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt. It's not dissimilar to pre-1929 kulaks, though the kulaks were encouraged/enabled to become a relatively wealthy/middle class peasantry who employed people and were directly involved in the production without owning large swathes of land, acting as a kind of a social dampener against a revolution.
Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
Kulaks were the stated problem, the real problem were the middling farmers. If you're a smallholder with a surplus of land, your production is very elastic.
You can plant cash crops and sell them to buy industrial products. Or you can plant crops that boost your quality of life directly: fruit, vegetables, tobacco, animal fodder.
The "price scissors" (low price of wheat, high price of goods) meant that middling farmers stopped planting wheat that the USSR needed to feed the cities and to pay for imports. To make the peasants plant wheat again the Soviets took away their land in the name of economy of scale (collectivization), but the real goal was to limit the size of personal plots.
> The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt.
So, it was an anti-revolutionary policy. Which at that time of history worked as well as an anti-communist policy.
> Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.
Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.
It's important for me to use words precisely. If somebody implies, for example, that capitalism is the opposite of communism, that's just snatching the words and waving them like banners.
The non-oral version of the explanation author received is likely 農地解放, a postwar US/Allied military led land reform.
The core idea of it, I think, is that those landlords must have been the mainsails of prewar Japanese military dictatorship regime and its expansionism under the strong leadership of its emperor, and breaking up land ownership will make it complicated for Japan to re-consolidate power and/or to somehow become closer to the Soviets.
I guess it did serve its core purpose of keeping China/Russia at bay, considering Japan has been extraordinary antagonistic to neighboring, and/or openly communist and/or totalitarian regimes, despite running on a rather ethnocentric communism-from-first-principle political system...
1: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%BE%B2%E5%9C%B0%E6%94%B9%E9...
You have to remember that in 1950, the US had a tremendous influence in Japan, to put it mildly, and also in 1950, the US was rabidly, performatively anti-communist. When McCarthyism was getting started stateside, we were also carrying out a "Red Purge" in Japan.
Anyway, yeah, in this context, Japan passed the Agricultural Land Act of 1952, which was intended to turn land owned by a few rich landlords into small, independently owned private farms. That may sound like the opposite of capitalism, and it is, but as I understand it, the idea was to turn what were basically serfs into a proper middle class, by redistributing the wealth and means of production directly down to them, which would then prevent communism from being as appealing. I don't know about the logic, but I guess it worked, since Japan isn't communist?
Your choice of adjectives "rabidly" particularly underscores the times.
The communist policy everywhere was to rob the small farmers and small business owners of everything they owned and force them to become quasi-serfs.
The socialist/communist economy is the final extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, towards which USA and other Western countries have been continuously evolving during the last quarter of century. The economy of USA in 2026 is much more similar to the economy of one of the former socialist countries in 1976 than it resembles the economy of USA in 1976.
Small farmers and businessmen were the main enemies of communism, everywhere.
So what Japan enacted was indeed a good anti-communist policy.
Fighting against big companies and supporting small businesses is the opposite of communist policies.
There were a lot of great differences between true communism and what the communists themselves claimed communism to be. There were also a lot of great differences between true communism and what communism has been claimed to be in USA.
Source: I have grown up in a country occupied by communist invaders, so I know what true communism is.
> I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).
You are meant to "own the means of production" not in an actual, but more ideal sense. Owning a farm or workshop to the exclusion of other people makes you petit bourgeois and this is bad. Communism promotes collective farms. AFAIK Poland was the only European Eastern Bloc country to tolerate small private farms, as a concession to obstinate peasants after the death of Stalin.
Promoting small individual farms is a more Georgist, populist capitalist or possibly strictly conservative policy. Not speaking to its economic sense though.
> to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature
War is peace,
Freedom is slavery,
Ignorance is strength
The point, as I see it, being that politicians like to make contradicting statements. Good for sales you could say. It is possible to cut through such lies by using logic, good on you for doing that. Unfortunately, many people take such statements as true and mostly get confused by it.
That doesn't seem strange to me at all. You give the people some of the things that they want from communism so that they will be content without communism. It's exactly what Bismarck did in Germany around 1900 (unemployment benefits, retirement funds and health insurance) and it was widely considered a success. Perhaps that was even an inspiration for Japan
You are a absolutely right the coming generation would have no idea about the carming, or wouldnlack to see the real process