What technological advances changed farming and mining in the west
The great word of this nineteenth century has been production. The great word of the twentieth century will be-listen to me, you youngsters-markets. The statistics certainly confirm the dominance of production in nineteenth-century America. While the population doubled between and , the number of persons employed in industry increased nearly three times. The amount of horsepower used increased four times. Before the war the United States had been an agricultural nation, although industry was growing steadily.
We are searching data for your request:
What technological advances changed farming and mining in the west
Upon completion, a link will appear to access the found materials.
Content:
- Technology’s Impact on Growth and Employment
- Winning in Africa’s agricultural market
- West Africa: Land Use and Land Cover Dynamics
- Can we reduce fertilizer use without sacrificing food production?
- Impact of Technology on Agriculture
- 2. Worries about life in 2025
- 10 Ways the Transcontinental Railroad Changed America
Technology’s Impact on Growth and Employment
Journal of Economic Structures volume 3 , Article number: 8 Cite this article. Metrics details. This paper applies the framework for pro-poor analysis to welfare changes from a CGE-microsimulation model to analyze what are the better or worse models for agriculture modernization, and to estimate the contribution of growth and redistribution to changes in poverty in DRC.
The findings indicate that labor-using technological change generates absolute and relative pro-poor effects whereas capital-using technological change leads to immiserizing growth. More importantly, the results suggest that labor-using technological change can be independently sufficient for reducing poverty via the income growth effects.
This study also highlights how developing input supply networks, securing tenure among smallholders, and improving access to land for women are important for pro-poor agricultural modernization. Agricultural transformation is essential for the Democratic Republic of Congo DRC because it has huge potential to spur growth and raise income. Agriculture employs most of the labor in DRC and produces the largest percentage of total value added. Figure 1 shows that agriculture employs Sectors such as textiles, chemicals, construction, and forestry only produce a small share of value added and contribute marginally to employment creation.
Figure 1 further indicates that agriculture and trade sectors lie below the degree line, meaning that the share of employment in these sectors is higher than the share of value added from these sectors. However, the largest gap between the contribution to value added and employment appears to be in agriculture. Profile of sectoral employment and value added Agriculture is the most unproductive sector in DRC because of inconsistent and uncoordinated agricultural development strategies, coupled with conflict and the progressive withdrawal of the government from supporting agricultural activities.
According to Otchia [ b ] , government policy implemented since led to the collapse of large-scale commercial agriculture, favored subsistence agriculture, and distorted economic incentives against agriculture.
In addition to this, the government removed all subsidies and price support measures to agriculture in Consequently, farmers use a rudimentary agricultural technology mostly based on outdated production methods and inputs. Agriculture also faces high transaction costs due to the lack of infrastructure most of which was destroyed during political conflicts.
Low productivity in agriculture entails unstable and low paid jobs. As a result, an overwhelming proportion of agricultural workers are poor. Four out of every five rural poor work in agriculture. In urban areas, agriculture accounts for one-third of the poor. Nevertheless, agriculture is still attracting labor in both urban and rural areas. According to Herderschee et al. Despite the low productivity, labor accrues in agriculture because it can produce the amount of food necessary for their subsistence.
This implies that most of the farming activities are of a small scale and aim to increase food security. Given its low productivity, increasing the amount of labor and land is the only way to raise production in agriculture.
Labor flows to subsistence farming as it uses essentially manual work, whereas large-scale farmers tend to expand land. Indeed, DRC is far from reaching the agriculture frontier, as it uses only 11 percent of the 80 million hectares of arable non-forest land for agriculture. However, in recent years, much of agricultural land has been developed for export-oriented large-scale commercial agriculture. Footnote 1 These agricultural investments are made by foreign investors to secure their own food needs.
This constrains access to land for small-scale farmers. Against this background, agricultural productivity improvement is the fundamental policy to initiate agricultural transformation and raise income of the poor Alvarez-Cuadrado and Poschke [ ]; Ngai and Pissarides [ ].
The empirical literature reports strong and robust effects of agriculture productivity on poverty Thirtle et al. However, the magnitude of poverty reduction due to agricultural productivity growth varies largely across countries, depending on the way they developed and used new technologies de Janvry and Sadoulet [ ].
The literature documents a range of policies to increase agriculture productivity and enhance income-increasing structural change. Footnote 2 Among them, technological change has been acknowledged as the principal driver of productivity growth OECD [ ]; Morris et al.
However, it is worth mentioning that the innovation, selection, and adoption of new technologies depend on the agriculture frontier, factor endowment, and market imperfections.
Hayami and Ruttan [ ] used data on agriculture inputs to assess how endowment drove the direction of technical change in the US and Japan during — They found that land abundance in the US favored labor-saving technological change while the land scarcity in Japan led to the development and adoption of land-saving technologies.
As a mechanization strategy, labor-saving technological change consists of using tractors and machinery, whereas land-saving technological change focuses on biological and chemical innovations.
A recent successful case of land-saving technological change occurred during the Green Revolution in Asia. The Green Revolution was an intensifying of input-based production characterized by the use of high-yielding and fertilizer-efficient new varieties of seed rice and wheat. Policymakers initiated this type of agricultural transformation to increase food production and reduce hunger and malnutrition in the s.
Hence, it is conceptually clear that the Green Revolution increased agriculture and food production. Though it is expected that agricultural productivity improvement tends to reduce poverty, the extent to which it reduces inequality and benefits small-scale farmers is still open to question.
For instance, the pro-poorness of the Green Revolution has been disputed, since its effectiveness in reducing inequality is not straightforward. The main argument states that the Green Revolution worsened income distribution as it was biased in favor of larger farmers and missed the poorer subsistence small-scale farmers Das [ ]; Griffin [ ]; Freebairn [ ]; Goldman and Smith [ ]. Furthermore, it increased landless farmers and the demand for unskilled labor, which in turn lowered wage laborers Hazell and Ramasamy [ ]; Glaeser [ ]; Cleaver [ ].
Despite this, the experience of Asia points to a clear consensus on the role of strong public policies and investment in creating a pro-poor Green Revolution Eicher [ ]; Smale [ ]; Hazell [ ].
These policies include agricultural research and development, irrigation, rural roads, access to credit, and price support policies. In addition, those policies had been successful when they have been implemented together. However, there is no empirical assessment on the pro-poorness of technological change and the complementary rural development policies in Africa, especially in DRC. This paper thus aims to assess what are the better and worse models for agricultural modernization in DRC.
Agricultural transformation is qualified as a better model only if it is centered on small-scale farmers as most of them are poor and have limited resource endowment relative to other farmers. To put it differently, a better model for agricultural modernization produces pro-poor effects where poor households gain relative to the richer ones.
Several recent studies have looked at the pro-poor effects of policies, particularly using CGE-microsimulation model Boccanfuso et al. To look at the pro-poorness of different strategies for modernizing agriculture, I combine three techniques, namely a computable general equilibrium model, a household-survey based microsimulation, and least square regressions.
I adopt a sequential approach that can be described in four steps. In the first step, I evaluate the effects of agricultural modernization strategies on employment, wages, and rents, and the price of goods and services.
I use a CGE-microsimulation model that captures various links through which agricultural modernization affects households. These links include the return to labor and land, the price of goods, the impact on non-agriculture sector, and sectoral labor mobility. Then I feed the changes from the CGE model into a microsimulation model, which takes into account household heterogeneity in terms of factor endowments and consumption patterns, to generate welfare gains or losses at the household level.
Using these welfare changes, in the third step I apply the pro-poor growth framework to assess which of the agricultural modernization strategies is pro-poor and the extent to which growth and redistribution contribute to welfare changes, following Annabi et al. Finally, I select a strategy that produced pro-poor welfare gains in the previous stage, and use a least square regression as in Ravallion and Lokshin [ ] to quantify the determinants of pro-poor agricultural modernization at the household level.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents an overview of the agricultural sector in DRC. Section 3 presents the theoretical framework of agricultural modernization, while Sect. Section 5 discusses and presents the results of policy experiments. Finally, Sect. However, it is important to note that the importance of agriculture is not a result of improved agricultural production.
Rather, it is due to the marked reduction of mining production, which declined faster than agriculture. In recent years, agriculture became an urban phenomenon, especially for food security reasons and proximity to markets. Urban or peri-urban farming in the DRC is not only a response to the rise in food insecurity; it also serves as an income-generating activity because of the increasing demand for vegetables in cities and soaring food prices.
As a result, the agricultural sector has become the second largest employer for urban workers after the trade sector. This section describes some key characteristics and features of agriculture in DRC, relevant to the problems under review. Land is a very important asset for DRC farmers for its economic, cultural and spiritual significance. Due to bad governance corrupted judiciary system, weaken traditional land rights, flawed land law uncertain land rights, outdated land registry , however, land has become the key driver of conflict in the eastern part of the country Vlassenroot and Huggins [ ]; Huggins [ ].
The most core issue in conflicts over land concerns limited access to land, land succession problem, and inequitable distribution.
There are other factors behind land issues in DRC, such as colonization, land grab, migration, and climate change Long [ ]; Chausse et al. The consequences of these measures and events are visible in all their extent: increased landless and reduced average land size. For instance, the highly skewed nature of land distribution in DRC is evident if one looks at Fig. The figures indicate that farms are very small; the average land holding per household is in order of 1.
The median are about 50 percent lower than the mean, implying the existence of high land inequality. Moving to the per capita distribution, panel b of Fig. Despite the dominance of small farms, it is interesting to note that the average land per capita is not much of issue as it ranks DRC among countries with more than an average of potential agricultural land. On average, land per adult is a bit more than half a hectare in urban areas but nearly 1 hectare in peri-urban and 1.
As one would expect, the average land per adult is significantly higher in rural areas because of migration to urban areas. The significant discrepancies between mean and median land size suggest the limitation of the figures to assess land distribution in DRC.
Therefore, I complement the land distribution analysis by decomposing the Gini coefficient of inequality between urban, peri-urban, and rural areas. In this study, I decompose the Gini coefficient into three components, namely a within-group inequality term, a between-group inequality term, and an overlap term. The within-group inequality term is a weighted sum of the inequalities calculated for each area urban, peri-urban, rural , whereas weights depend on the population and land share of each area.
The between-group inequality term is calculated on the total population where the land size of each person in the area is replaced by the average land size in the area where he lives. This component of inequality thus indicates the mean difference across areas.
It reflects the interaction effect among groups. Footnote 3. Based on the figures on Table 1 , it appears that the overall Gini coefficient of land per household is 0.
Table 1 also shows a more unequal land distribution in terms of land per capita, as the Gini of 0. Comparing these estimates to those of the sub-region reported by Jayne et al.
Winning in Africa’s agricultural market
Gross Value Added by agriculture, forestry, and fishing was estimated at Rs. Share of agriculture and allied sectors in gross value added GVA of India at current prices stood at Consumer spending in India will return to growth in post the pandemic-led contraction, expanding by as much as 6. The Indian food industry is poised for huge growth, increasing its contribution to world food trade every year due to its immense potential for value addition, particularly within the food processing industry.
West Africa: Land Use and Land Cover Dynamics
As governments across the globe grapple with the impacts of climate change and the rise in food insecurity due to Covid, an existential question is also coming into focus: How do we prepare now to feed 10 billion people? Although our current food system fails to meet the needs of people and the planet, there are reasons to be optimistic about the future. Emerging technologies present us with a growing range of opportunities to transform our food and agriculture systems. To harness these opportunities, policymakers, scientists and entrepreneurs must:. This paper explores these key areas. It illustrates the significant potential of some of the most transformative food and agriculture technologies, while outlining some of the underlying challenges of bringing them to scale responsibly. It also begins to address some policy areas that warrant attention from governments and highlights the questions that we must address to create a food system fit for the 21st century — a system that delivers for everybody, everywhere.
Can we reduce fertilizer use without sacrificing food production?
Manifest destiny was the 19th century U. Democrats used the term in the s to justify the war with Mexico. The concept was largely denounced by Whigs and fell into disuse after the midth century. Advocates of manifest destiny believed that expansion was not only wise, but that it was readily apparent manifest and could not be prevented destiny.
Impact of Technology on Agriculture
There was a time when traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast meant riding for months in a horse-drawn wagon or stagecoach, or sailing southward to Panama and then crossing the Isthmus to board another ship for a journey up the other coast. But that all changed on May 10, , when railroad baron Leland Stanford whacked in a ceremonial gold spike to mark the joining together of the tracks of the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad in Promontory, Utah, to form the transcontinental railroad. Some 21, workers —from Irish-American Civil War veterans, freed slaves and Mormon pioneers to Chinese laborers —had been recruited to perform the hard and often dangerous work of laying the 1, miles of track. While the railroad's construction was a mammoth undertaking, its effects on the country were equally profound. Here are some of the ways that the first transcontinental railroad—and the many other transcontinental lines that followed it—changed America. In addition to transporting western food crops and raw materials to East Coast markets and manufactured goods from East Coast cities to the West Coast, the railroad also facilitated international trade.
2. Worries about life in 2025
Technology has always fueled economic growth, improved standards of living, and opened up avenues to new and better kinds of work. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which brought us Watson and self-driving cars, mark the beginning of a seismic shift in the world as we know it. To navigate the unstable labormarket and seize the plentiful opportunities offered by new technologies, we must find a way to more quickly adapt. But major innovations defined as widely-used technologies that improve over time and have spillover effects that provoke further advancements have been around since the beginning of recorded history. They also help open avenues to new kinds of work. This brought about an explosion of innovation, and resulted in an increase of living standards to such an extent, that the average American today has a quality of life that was unimaginable to even the wealthiest nobles of that era. Moore then revised the prediction in to every two years. He also later became the CEO of Intel.
10 Ways the Transcontinental Railroad Changed America
Women and the Progressive Movement ». It features a locomotive chugging from the foreground toward a far western horizon. To the left of the tracks are the standard images of the coming of civilization—a schoolhouse with romping children outside, a church, covered wagons, cabins and sturdy yeomen felling trees. To the right of the tracks we see the wild country that other pioneers will soon transform.
Before beginning to analyze technology that developed during the Middle Ages, it is helpful to understand the time period. Therefore, we will start this section with a series of web tutorials on the history of the Middle Ages. This web site is designed to assist those students who do not have a background in medieval European history. The "tutorial is presented in a series of chapters that summarize the economic, political, religious and intellectual environment of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The main objective of the tutorial is to furnish a baseline against which the vast changes of the following centuries may be measured. This introduction, although not comprehensive, is designed to assist students without a background or appreciation of Medieval history.
Over the past century, agricultural land use in the United States has seen drastic shifts to support increasing demand for food and commodities; in many regions, this has resulted in highly simplified agricultural landscapes. Surmounting evidence exhibits the negative impacts of this simplification on the long-term provisioning of necessary ecosystem services to and from agriculture. However, transitions toward alternative systems often occur at a small scale, rather than at a systemic level. Within the National Research Council's NRC sustainable agricultural systems framework, we utilize national open-source datasets spanning several decades to broadly assess past and current agricultural landscapes across the U. We integrate and analyze agricultural land use and land cover data with policy data to address two main objectives: 1 Document and visualize changes over recent decades in cropland conversion, agricultural productivity, and crop composition across the U. Farm Bills from to associated with these land use trends.
Signing up enhances your TCE experience with the ability to save items to your personal reading list, and access the interactive map. Canadian agriculture has experienced a markedly distinct evolution in each region of the country. A varied climate and geography have been largely responsible, but, in addition, each region was settled at a different period in Canada's economic and political development. The principal unifying factor has been the role of government: from the colonial era to present, agriculture has been largely state-directed and subordinate to other interests.
Sometimes there are things and is worse