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Hunter-gatherers in the Philippines who adopt farming work around ten hours a week longer than their forager neighbours, a new study suggests, complicating the idea that agriculture represents progress. The research also shows that a shift to agriculture impacts most on the lives of women.
[...] Every day, at regular intervals between 6am and 6pm, the researchers recorded what their hosts were doing and by repeating this in ten different communities, they calculated how 359 people divided their time between leisure, childcare, domestic chores and out-of-camp work. While some Agta communities engage exclusively in hunting and gathering, others divide their time between foraging and rice farming.
The study, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, reveals that increased engagement in farming and other non-foraging work resulted in the Agta working harder and losing leisure time. On average, the team estimate that Agta engaged primarily in farming work around 30 hours per week while foragers only do so for 20 hours. They found that this dramatic difference was largely due to women being drawn away from domestic activities to working in the fields. The study found that women living in the communities most involved in farming had half as much leisure time as those in communities which only foraged.
Also, hunting comes with beer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Alfred on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:50PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday May 22 2019, @04:13PM
Well, that's partly right at least. Studies by historians of medieval farmers (peasants) showed that they likely worked fewer hours on average than the modern 40-hour workweek, averaged over the year. (Really busy with long hours in planting and harvesting season, not so much during the winter.) Medieval farmers certainly worked a lot fewer hours than workers in factories at the beginning of the industrial revolution, when labor laws didn't exist, despite the fact that the industrial revolution is viewed as "progress."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:29PM
No, there were not a lot of time wasted while waiting for the crops to grow and ripen. There's also the never ending maintaining old or making new equipment. There was the care for the animals. There was the need for teaching the younger ones. There was trade/markets.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday May 23 2019, @02:59AM
Lessee... this "sitting around watching the crops grow" includes moving irrigation (may be daily, depending), spraying for various pests, fixing fence so your neighbor's cattle don't trample and eat the crop, repairing the myriad pieces of equipment that suffer wear and tear and are too expensive to replace, long drives to and from that leased field two counties away, plowing fallow fields, cleaning out storage bins, fixing your private access roads, mowing/turning/baling hay, and doubtless dozens of other tasks that don't leap to mind this instant. Farmers during the growing season are usually busy as hell. And that's just the crop farmers. Livestock farmers get to do pretty much all the same and then some, plus during calving they get to enjoy the finest weather that bitch Mother Nature has to offer.
As to the price of combines, well, so long as you like to eat, and a combine costs $200k, and the average farmer doesn't have that much laying around in cash... they're gonna be bought on credit. And then that dumb hick farmer will use a variety of fancy tech to level his fields, plan his irrigation layout, minimize use of pesticides and fertilizer, calculate seed rates and projected harvests and fuel requirements, and generally apply a good deal more brainwork than your average cubefarm type ever does.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:11AM
Primitive farmers had lots to do while the crops grew. Just making clothing, maintaining fences/hedgerows, preserving food, looking after the livestock though they also had a lot of holidays.