On the eve of a new Agricultural Revolution

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2.5 million years ago, humans moved from one place to another according to climatic conditions, which had a primary impact on food, because the gathering of plants and the hunting of animals depended on factors that men and women had not yet learned to subjugate. Until recently, experts argued that the life of these prehistoric humans was dangerous and full of uncertainties and that, on the contrary, the agricultural revolution that took place about 10,000 years ago brought about the progress on which current society has been built. But now this assumption not only generates great doubts but scientific data allows explaining the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest fraud in history." This is expressed, in these very words, by Yuval Noah Harari in the book Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind (Edicions 62, 2014). In the publication, Harari argues that the theses that defend an improvement in human intelligence when man takes the reins of cultivation and livestock are not true and that, rather, instead of making our lives easier, the Revolution has been the prelude to the organization of current markets, consumerism, private property, competitive fever, hunger, diseases, etc. For our ancestral relatives, agriculture meant an exponential increase in the total amount of food, it is true. But equally exponential was the increase in time and effort they had to invest to respond to the demands of a growing demography with growing needs. Demands, demography, and needs that continue to spread today. The Agricultural Revolution, as Harari explains, analogously implied an impoverishment of the diet – it became less varied –, a setback in leisure time, a demographic explosion, the appearance of privileged social strata, harder work, worsening health, and the establishment of the concept of private property, which implied having to defend possessions and try to increase them, a fact that led to wars. To give us an idea, today livestock farming has 1 billion sheep, 1 billion pigs, more than 1 billion cows, and 25 billion chickens spread across the planet. Nothing compared to the few thousands that existed at the time of the birth of agriculture. If we add the amount of cultivated land here, it is easy to understand that, rather than controlling agriculture and livestock, what has happened is that agriculture and livestock have controlled man.

But new outbreaks point to a trend that could reverse this condition and, 10,000 years later, make good on the Agricultural Revolution of those men and women of prehistory. On the one hand, the robotization of jobs – it is predicted that by 2030, 70% of the tasks currently performed by humans will be done by machines – will imply a drastic change in daily life, given that the labor system will be forced to reduce the working day to a maximum of 15 or 20 hours per week in order to keep the wheel of consumption active. As a consequence of this fact, humans will enjoy more free time, and this favors the other hypothesis that predicts an increase in community or solidarity tasks and, even further, the conjecture that would make possible the deployment of the Universal Basic Income – which in English is abbreviated as UBI –; a theory that has accumulated decades of studies and for which experiments are being carried out all over the world. The Dutchman Rutger Bregman, the most prominent scholar of this current, has developed a principle that not only does not represent a frontal clash with the theses of capitalism but, contrary to what would be predictable, praises them. Bregman argues that we owe the increase in the well-being of a large part of humanity to capitalism. Perhaps, to be exact, it would be necessary to qualify and state that, if we owe it to anything, it is to the aforementioned Agricultural Revolution of thousands of years ago. In any case, Bregman does not miss the opportunity to, after praising the capitalist current, predict a paradigm shift with respect to the concept of wealth. Or rather, a prediction about how and when we will make the leap to the model that will allow us to generate "real wealth" instead of "wealth" tout court. The pillars of this economic pattern are based on two certainties: the first is that poverty is increasingly expensive for society, and the second, that working less would make us happier in the medium and long term. However, previously, unlearning is necessary. A notable cultural shake-up. And two of the main currents of this transformation are, precisely, agriculture and livestock. Precepts such as regenerative agriculture, Holistic Management, Keyline Design, the new method of Organic Managers or the concept Regrarian are awakening with great force all over the world, especially in places with a strong tradition of rural trades. These precepts propose a new style of agriculture based on opposition to chemical treatments, favoring the natural regeneration of soils and better water use. In this way, significant cost savings are achieved in the medium term. At the same time, there is also an increase in product quality and, it can even lead to an increase in production. The world reference for these practices is Darren J. Doherty, an Australian of Irish origin who has been on a lecture tour in Girona, Es Mercadal (Menorca), Zaragoza, and Lleida in recent days. Darren gets on stage and, before starting, jingles a bell like those used for cattle. It is the prelude to a show of arguments, common sense, and touches of humor that quickly win over the local farmers, including the most skeptical. The theories and on-site demonstrations act conclusively, to the point that new adherents are born from each visit, from each conference.

Darren J. Doherty has a team of young farmers made up of Francesc, from Girona, José Ángel, from Teruel, and Manel Badia, from Seròs, all under the brand Organic Managers. During conferences and field visits, they present the first results from experimental fields in Catalonia, Teruel, and Menorca. And as usually happens in these cases, social media has circulated the cases at breakneck speed, to the point that they have already received the first proposal to develop one of their regenerative agriculture plans in the United States. Everything seems to indicate that agriculture and livestock farming are in the second phase of the Revolution that took place 10,000 years ago. Humans will begin to perceive these disciplines as sources of real wealth instead of practices inexorably linked to chemical treatments. We will move from overproduction that determines supply, to production that will be determined by the consumer. And most interestingly: we will understand that we are not only what we eat, but also the land we sow.