The Overgrown Gentleman's Hobby Farm

I recently read a 2011 article from PNAS titled "Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was note more productive than foraging." 

(The author, Samuel Bowles, has a PhD in economics from Harvard, and his analysis of early farming and foraging is pretty interesting. I'm not sure why I haven't seen it around the paleo-sphere.)

If statistical analysis gets you all hot and bothered, this article is for you. It's not a dry read, though. I quite enjoyed it. The parts of the paper that stand out to me are his analysis of the costs and risks of the delayed returns inherent to farming and his conclusions.

Farming is commonly associated with being capable of generating more food per acre than foraging, but Bowles identifies several other factors that weigh against a sizable yield. In no particular order:

• Costs of storage. Someone's gotta maintain the stores, prevent spoilage, deter theft, etc
• Decreasing dietary breadth and its associated diseases of deficiency.
• Cost of delayed return (as Bowles put it, we are impatient creatures).
• Risk of crop failure.

 (Mind you, these are not all of the factors in Dr. Bowles' paper, just some that stood out to me)
Ultimately Bowles does some stats magic that causes a non-math person like myself to stare off into space and think about chewing tin-foil, and when the magic is all said and done,

Average productivity levels in cultivation appear to be in the neighborhood of three-fifths of the returns to foraging wild species, depending on the adjustment. 

 Why, then, would we even go the way of agriculture? In the discussion section, Bowles notes that if a group were to abandon the least efficient sections of their food gathering (such as hunting for snark), and instead turn their time to a minimal amount of intentionally-planted crops, the average return of the crops will initially beat the returns usually seen while snark hunting or foraging for marginal plant foods. I take that to mean that on a certain scale, cultivation had a lot going for it. However, like investors who dump a diversified portfolio to devote all of their cash to a single nicely performing stock, early farmers chased the specter of huge returns at the expense of nutrition and adoption of risk, until their assessments of foraging productivity were skewed by the farming itself.

It's a fascinating paper and I do hope you'll all read it.