How? Generations of clever people ignored the naysayers who told them, "just do the work like the rest of us, you lazy bastard."

The only reason people go hungry is because of policy.

The aliens sought out new challenges after tiring of pyramids.

There's a theory in my family.

You have true farmers, then you have factory farms. Factory Farms are not just for animals. They exclusively produce cash crop, they exclusively optimize profit, they also do hardly any of the work themselves. They'll be in a combine, sure. But combines are quite literally automatic nowadays, so it becomes a second office where they're negotiated deals and labor and contracts and taxes.

The true farmers on the other hand? Way back when, before Monsanto and Tyson, farm communities took care of specific jobs for specific farms because one of those farmers found a really good way to do it, or is just much more efficient.

That left a little more time for each of the farmers to work on something they were skilled with, or do a hobby even.

Guess what was a popular hobby amongst farmers? Electric Scale Trains. These farmers also invented and designed and engineered a lot of these tools and equipment, because they had to repair their machines quicker than a service tech could come out.

So you get robust engineering out of a Farmer. Then the Factory Farmer comes in and says "Hey, I got a friend named John Deer who could mass produce these, and the non-presceint Farmer said cool."

BAM innovations stifled.

Seems history shows innovations came from many individual sources but those Factory Farms weren't a thing. Corporations did help develop ideas into products but large scale Monsanto style factory farms weren't a thing during the time combine harvesters were being invented.

It seems quite the opposite: the efficiency of the combine harvesters made factory farms much more likely.

David Macauley’s illustration in the book The Way Things Work is how I learned about the beauty of the combine harvester

Clearly a Promethean device

I think you might have missed the point of my story.

Farmers were the engineers designing these things. Because that's all the kind of farmers there was.

Now we have Factory Factory farms, but there are still some small farmers doing this stuff. We don't have many true farmer/engineers left. And it's bad for all of us.

It'll circle back

From my perspective this "pinnacle of human ingenuity" is actually a farse, because it relies on a monoculture and is therefore unsustainable in the long term.

Don't get me wrong, the engineering is cool and I understand how important the mass production of food has been up to this point in human history, but there is another side of the story. The advent of machinery like this is part of why modern farmers use so many pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers - a monoculture depletes the soil of its nutrients and decreases natural pest control, necessitating the use of chemicals. The use of those chemicals has in turn driven huge ecosystem changes that we are only just beginning to understand the impact of (such as mass pollinator die-offs, changes to soil microbiology, pollution of fresh water sources, pollution of cropland soil, and more) as well as impacting humans in ways we don't understand since some of those chemicals make their way into our bodies.

One 4 meter line wheat and the next one a different crop, with 3 or 4 crops alternating, would be fine too. Especially with kilometers long fields.

Edit: sonething like this:

That's nothing compared to the Bagger 288

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow

It is the savior of mankind.

You do know that crop rotation exists? It is absolute bullshit to say that using a combine harvester requires monoculture. You can simply rotate what crops you plant on a single field each year. This is also necessary if you care about would health and want to reduce efforts in fighting other weeds. If you also include Legominoses (idk if that's the correct word) into your crop rotation you reduce the need for fertilisers, due to them being able to fixate ammonium in the soil.

This is not really doable. It may be for small scale production of vegetables, but not for anything that needs great efficency. In the farming sector the trend goes towards bigger machines and bigger fields to increase efficiency and also to eliminate the need for work done by humans through automation. Concepts like this are incredibly hard to adapt, since they significantly increase the amount of work without increasing the profit. Also due to different plants having different needs it becomes significantly harder to actually harvest the needed amounts in order to make a profit.

I mean, one track can be as wide as a field sprayer as well. Not more work then.

For harvesting you would need to change the tool or adjust the machine for every row.

What, why? Barely two cultures have the same harvest time.

You seem to think of a lot of different cultures in rows. What i'm trying to say is, maybe 4 cultures in a field 4 times the size, but alternating rows.

They use physics and fluid dynamics (read: airflow) in a smart reliable way. Like all things in nature, grain has properties such as weight and mass, that are not the same for every variety. So there you have it. Lots of experience and engineering.

-circa the 70's- we call it 'green revolution' because we multiplied tenfold the harvests with mechanisation and standardisation. Back than the world wad hungry so it was necessary.

Today we see a weird phoenomenon where the abundance of resources changed customer behaviour and now we are causing the opposite effectes, effectively depleting the environment around us.

I can't type too much on a phone but the consistent way to learn this is following researches and learning the basis of soil maintenance, structure etc.

All that can be done with agromomy manuals and practical tips.

Even old ones really