Factoids

Factoids will appear here throughout the semester. On each quiz you will be awarded points for showing that you have memorized these factoids. (You don't have to memorize the citations.)

You won't have to explain factoids on the quizzes; you just have to know them. It is on the exams that you may have to discuss their significance. Factoids may recur on later quizzes!

• From 1800-2000 world population rose just over sixfold (from just under 1 billion to just over 6 billion, around) while agricultural production rose at least tenfold
  • Federico, G. (2005). Feeding the world: an economic history of agriculture, 1800-2000. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton Univ. Press, p. 2
    
    
• Roughly 2 million starved or fled Ireland during the Potato Famine. Ireland not only exported large amounts of beef, pork and grain during this period, but exports actually increased; for example, in 1846 alone, 500,000 pigs were shipped to England.
  • Ross, E. B. (1998). The Malthus factor: population, poverty, and politics in capitalist development. London, Zed.
    
    
• Between 1876-79 approx. 8 million Indians starved in a drought affecting many parts of the globe. The deaths have been blamed on El Niño, but India also exported a record 358,000 tons of wheat to UK in 1877-78.
  • Mike Davis (2001), Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the making of the Third World.  London and NY: Verso, pp 31-32.
    
    
• Marx's stock in trade was analysis of how social relations articulated with production in industrial society, but he knew little of the same relationships among peasant farmers. He described an agrarian countryside as "formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes."
  
  
• Great Basin Shoshoni spent most of the year in small family groups, gathering into larger groups in winter. They did not recognize private property.
  • Steward, J.
    
    
• In the early 1960s Lee documented Ju/'oansi as spending an average of 2 hours daily in subsistence pursuits.
  • Lee, R. 1968
    
    
• In the late 19th century, !Kung worked as hunters, guides, messengers, bearers, and servants in the ivory trade.
  
  
• In the late 19th century, many !Kung lost their livestock in a Rinderpest epidemic.
  
  
• At the Amazonian Rio Negro site, soil charcoal (apparently from swidden cultivation) was dated to 4000 BC
  • Denevan 1992:374
    
    
• A comparison of prehistoric skeletons in the Lower Illinois Valley showed acute episodic nutritional stress before maize agriculture, but chronic nutritional stress after.
  • Buikstra
    
    
• Whereas the Hanunoo were putting in 500-1000 hrs/year into agriculture, the the intensive-farming frontier Kofyar were found to be putting in 1500 hrs/year in the 1980s.
  • Conklin; Stone et al. 1990
    
    
• Although overall inputs and impossible to measure precisely, a study of extensive rice farmers in the Philippines and intensive rice farmers in Dawa, China found that the Chinese Dawa farmers were putting in over 4x the amount of work into their rice, but were harvesting around 4x as much.  Their efficiency ratios were around the same. (discussed in the Netting 1993 chapter)
  
  
• Between 1930-1990, population densities in Machakos Dist., Kenya, rose from 100 to 200/km²
  • Mortimore and Tiffen 1995
    
    
• In 1934, often cited as the key year for hybrid maize introduction, 36 million acres were taken out of production by federally-sponsored acreage reduction .  During the 1990s, the yearly average was 55 million acres.
  
  
• Between 1940-1950, agricultural nitrogen use in the US went from 100,000 tons to 1.5 million tons.
  
  
• The feeding efficiency of beef (feed:meat) has fluctuated between 9-14 in the last cenruty
  • Smil 2002
    
    
• A study from a few years ago showed over 18,000 deaths from MRSA in the US, compared to around 16,000 deaths from AIDS. (source) (Optional: If you're interested in the research linking MRSA to factory farming, start here.)
  
  
• In Spring 2002, when the first GMO was approved for India (Bt cotton), the buffer stock of wheat and rice was 41.2 million tons over the desired level.
  • Stone, G. D. (2002). "Both Sides Now" Current Anthropology 43: 611-630.
    
    
• According to Denevan's estimates, New World population dropped by 89% between 1492-1650.
  
  
• Over 55 colleges/universities in the US now have their own farm/gardens.
  • Barlett, P.
    
    
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