A good scythe is faster then a weed-wacker but slower then a lawnmower. I have been using a scythe to cut my lawn for a few years now. It works, and is fun, but you must keep it VERY sharp. If the scythe is not razor sharp it will simply push the grass over instead of cutting it. A sickle will still work when somewhat dull, because it gathers the grass into the concave bit and/or you can hold on the grass with one hand and cut it with the other.
A scythe you have to sharpen every 5-10 min or so, normally you keep a scythe stone in your pocket to do this. The sickle you can just sharpen at the beginning of the day and that will be good enough.
The sharpening process takes some practice to get good at, particularly if you start peening it as well.
it really does. I use a scythe for clearing high grass that I got from lee valley and hoped it would be a fun lawnmower alternative, but it was less satisfying than I had hoped. Maybe next season I'll get good at it, or buy a few more and and bus city people out to do scythercise classes.
This reminds me of economist E. F. Schumacher's idea of "intermediate technology." It's tech that is more advanced than an impoverished person's existing technology, but not so advanced that only a few can afford and use. Intermediate technology prevents a dual economy / neocolonialism where only a few people get rich and productive from using advanced labor-saving technology.
> regions where sickles (or machetes) are traditionally used
I don't understand how it's possible that there are regions that don't use scythes (for crops that warrant them), when scythes have been around for over a thousand years?
I would venture to say that if they haven't transitioned yet it's because they don't want to (for whatever reasons--no idea what those might be).
* Scythes need to be sharp, a machete will work even when poorly maintained.
* Machetes are cheaper to make.
* Machetes are easier to use
* Scythes are a specialized tool, where as I can buy a machete for ten dollars at Canadian Tire. Economics of scale are different.
> There are still several remaining scythe factories in the world. In recent years a competitive, market-driven economy is making it difficult for scythe making factories to retain the quality level that was once a standard.
Invention and adoption of technology, even "basic" technology, is very contingent on circumstance. Bows are pretty near universal (but not quite), but specific improvements like recurved limbs are patchy. And people aren't exactly quick to adopt new farming techniques when a failure could mean they starve. I guess that's also why this organization is pushing uphill. But I think it's very possible that lots of people haven't heard of or seriously evaluated a scythe.
There's illustrations inside the pyramids that are thousands of years old showing people watering their fields using a bucket on a long swinging arm. It needs just a couple of long poles, a bucket, and a rope.
I saw this still in use today when I went to Egypt. That blew my mind.
I mean it's an interesting idea, but it's weird to imagine that small time farmers in poor countries are capable of obtaining and using a sickle but are somehow not capable of obtaining and using a scythe.
At least looking for ones here in the US, a decent quality sickle seems to run in the $30-$60 range while places that sell scythes seem to cost $100-$300, so I can't imagine it's some massive price barrier either
I'm afraid you just dismissed the question, not answered it. Plenty of things changed in agriculture in spite of simple inertia. Why does sickle-for-wheat-scythe-for-hay concept seem to prevail for different cultures in distant lands for so long?
I'm not sure, but what I've read is that there's a loss of grain associated with using the scythe on wheat when it falls on the ground. Maybe it's a concern in some areas.
But I think that with a proper apparel such as the one we see in the video on the website, the fall can be made gentler while still keeping the significant efficiency gain that the scythe offers over the sickle.
I didn't dismiss it at all. I directly answered you. While plenty of things change despite inertia, plenty of things do NOT change. We've known about the benefits of no till, cover crops, crop rotation, etc. for centuries and they're still not common due to inertia. In the USA we know that government subsidies for corn have massively distorted the market and had huge negative impacts on health and the environment, but we don't change due to inertia. Water management something we're terrible at in the US despite having the knowledge of how to do it better, but we don't because of inertia. Don't underestimate the power of "we've always done it this way." People can come up with a thousand bad reasons not to do something.
In my company, another leader forced his division to stop using a manual tracking spreadsheet because it was wasting time. People HATED the idea of stopping it, expecting there to be huge issues, but the manager was right, all the information was already reliably recorded in other systems and this was just a wasteful manual copy. When people stopped using it, literally nothing went wrong or changed, no one needed it, but now everyone got back 15 minutes of their day. But people resisted because "we've always done it this way."
As another poster said, grain loss is more likely with these less-hand-labor-intensive methods, and people can overvalue the loss of that small amount despite the time and energy savings of scythes. So people might think, "I'll lose 3% of my harvest doing that, I can't afford that" except they'd expend 15% of the energy harvesting and thus that 3% loss is more than balanced out by the 85% time savings and the reduced work load. You can spend a fraction of that saved time making up the 3% difference in a hundred other ways.
People are very resistant to change. A lack of education produces lapses in logic and critical thinking and thus people won't evaluate the change in the right frame of reference.
Well, with a sickle you hold what you cut, and then you bind it together, so the grain doesn't fall on the ground. With a scythe you will have to somehow pick it up and organize in such a way that you can later collect it (without much dirt stuck to it etc.)
NB. In high-school, I worked one summer cleaning and otherwise maintaining the local after-school building. It had a huge lawn behind it, which I had to trim with a scythe once every few weeks. So, I thought I knew how to do that reasonably well...
And then, one day, some years later, me and few friends of mine went on a trip into the mountains, and we put our tent, as we later discovered, on some farmer's field. He got mad at us, and wanted us to cut the grass for him, as a form of compensation. Using a scythe on an incline, as opposed to flat surface is a... whole different story. I lodged it into the ground a few times, and then the farmer almost killed us :) In the end, we bought him some alcohol and left.
So, the moral of the story: scythe might not be always the best tool, and in some situations it's far from obvious how to use it efficiently.
Taking inspiration from your nickname, how do you explain the many technical aspects of Japan that are still stuck in the 90s? They surely know how to look around and they surely know better things have been battle tested for decades in other countries, and yet...
I mean from a capitalist point of view, a farmer that uses scythes will outperform ones that use sickles (according to this website anyway). So there's something else going on.
The skill tree depends on awful lot on what you care about, and don't assume that western "high tech" solutions are the best, because they're the most complicated.
From a "Built out of locally available resources, with minimum energy, and robust repairability," it's hard to beat a scythe or other similar tool.
And I guarantee a well built scythe will still work, if tolerably cared for, long past the last of our over-complicated tractors rusting in fields because the right software to update the firmware to allow you to start the engine after changing the oil was trying to talk to some server that no longer exists...
Unless you're making this argument. I can't actually tell which way you're arguing for.
In terms of joules spent per blade of grass cut, a well honed scythe in the hands of a skillful operator is more efficient than mechanized solutions. If you have an area where you already have an abundance of agricultural workers, it might be that scythe is a better solution than having your agriculture sector being dependent on fossil fuels.
"Efficient" in terms of what outputs, for what inputs?
You can't just handwave the term as a synonym for "I think it's better!" - it actually does imply inputs, outputs, and depending on what you want to optimize for, you may get very different results.
If a scythe is genuinely better for the job than a sickle, great!
But in a country without a lot of infrastructure and without modern supply chains, I'm pretty sure a tractor is the wrong solution to the problem. Unless, of course, your problem is "how to burden nations with loans they will never be able to pay back so you can come in and take over."
Imagine a farmer in a region that exclusively has manual laborers gets a machine that makes a hundred laborers' already meagerly paid jobs obsolete. You now have a hundred angry unemployed laborers and a prime suspect.
Yes, this is exactly what the Luddites were about (iirc). But you can't just barge in and make people's jobs obsolete. I'm sure even the scythe is seeing resistance because it can make a single person do the work of three others.
That said, something needs to be done to improve quality of life and reduce poverty. There need to be a lot more better paying jobs in the global South, but it seems that only China is willing to invest in e.g. the infrastructure required for that.
You can absolutely jump economic steps. Many countries never got wide deployment of wired telephones, and never will. They skipped right to wide deployment of mobile phones. Many of those same countries skipped right past desktop computers in every home and laptops to replace desktops and have gone straight from limited computer access to the mobile phone replaces desktop computers.
You certainly don't need to hit all the economic steps, but using capital to reduce labor doesn't make sense when labor is much less expensive than capital.
Working in the field is difficult, yes, but the western world still hasn't figured out an answer to the question "what happens when we run out of dead dinosaurs[1] to eat?". Until it has, any idea to not exacerbate the problem until we figure it out is, in my mind, a good idea.
>What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run it?
There used to be an easy answer to this, now it's not politically or morally acceptable to support: colonization. Colonization is what brought modern farming practices (and their accompanying massive yields) as well as the development of the infrastructure needed to support it and other developments.
My guess is that's because people don't like being colonized. "Modern" industrial farming is also depleting the soil, so I'm not sure the jury is out on it actually being "better" than local practices.
A good scythe is faster then a weed-wacker but slower then a lawnmower. I have been using a scythe to cut my lawn for a few years now. It works, and is fun, but you must keep it VERY sharp. If the scythe is not razor sharp it will simply push the grass over instead of cutting it. A sickle will still work when somewhat dull, because it gathers the grass into the concave bit and/or you can hold on the grass with one hand and cut it with the other.
A scythe you have to sharpen every 5-10 min or so, normally you keep a scythe stone in your pocket to do this. The sickle you can just sharpen at the beginning of the day and that will be good enough.
The sharpening process takes some practice to get good at, particularly if you start peening it as well.
https://scytheworks.ca/knowledge-base/chapter-4-preparing-th...
it really does. I use a scythe for clearing high grass that I got from lee valley and hoped it would be a fun lawnmower alternative, but it was less satisfying than I had hoped. Maybe next season I'll get good at it, or buy a few more and and bus city people out to do scythercise classes.
This reminds me of economist E. F. Schumacher's idea of "intermediate technology." It's tech that is more advanced than an impoverished person's existing technology, but not so advanced that only a few can afford and use. Intermediate technology prevents a dual economy / neocolonialism where only a few people get rich and productive from using advanced labor-saving technology.
> regions where sickles (or machetes) are traditionally used
I don't understand how it's possible that there are regions that don't use scythes (for crops that warrant them), when scythes have been around for over a thousand years?
I would venture to say that if they haven't transitioned yet it's because they don't want to (for whatever reasons--no idea what those might be).
Guesses at some reasons
* Scythes need to be sharp, a machete will work even when poorly maintained.
* Machetes are cheaper to make.
* Machetes are easier to use
* Scythes are a specialized tool, where as I can buy a machete for ten dollars at Canadian Tire. Economics of scale are different.
> There are still several remaining scythe factories in the world. In recent years a competitive, market-driven economy is making it difficult for scythe making factories to retain the quality level that was once a standard.
https://scytheworks.ca/swwobs-blade-choice/
Invention and adoption of technology, even "basic" technology, is very contingent on circumstance. Bows are pretty near universal (but not quite), but specific improvements like recurved limbs are patchy. And people aren't exactly quick to adopt new farming techniques when a failure could mean they starve. I guess that's also why this organization is pushing uphill. But I think it's very possible that lots of people haven't heard of or seriously evaluated a scythe.
There's illustrations inside the pyramids that are thousands of years old showing people watering their fields using a bucket on a long swinging arm. It needs just a couple of long poles, a bucket, and a rope.
I saw this still in use today when I went to Egypt. That blew my mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof
I mean it's an interesting idea, but it's weird to imagine that small time farmers in poor countries are capable of obtaining and using a sickle but are somehow not capable of obtaining and using a scythe.
At least looking for ones here in the US, a decent quality sickle seems to run in the $30-$60 range while places that sell scythes seem to cost $100-$300, so I can't imagine it's some massive price barrier either
It's usually lack of knowledge/understanding and simple inertia, "this is how we've always done it."
I'm afraid you just dismissed the question, not answered it. Plenty of things changed in agriculture in spite of simple inertia. Why does sickle-for-wheat-scythe-for-hay concept seem to prevail for different cultures in distant lands for so long?
I'm not sure, but what I've read is that there's a loss of grain associated with using the scythe on wheat when it falls on the ground. Maybe it's a concern in some areas.
But I think that with a proper apparel such as the one we see in the video on the website, the fall can be made gentler while still keeping the significant efficiency gain that the scythe offers over the sickle.
I didn't dismiss it at all. I directly answered you. While plenty of things change despite inertia, plenty of things do NOT change. We've known about the benefits of no till, cover crops, crop rotation, etc. for centuries and they're still not common due to inertia. In the USA we know that government subsidies for corn have massively distorted the market and had huge negative impacts on health and the environment, but we don't change due to inertia. Water management something we're terrible at in the US despite having the knowledge of how to do it better, but we don't because of inertia. Don't underestimate the power of "we've always done it this way." People can come up with a thousand bad reasons not to do something.
In my company, another leader forced his division to stop using a manual tracking spreadsheet because it was wasting time. People HATED the idea of stopping it, expecting there to be huge issues, but the manager was right, all the information was already reliably recorded in other systems and this was just a wasteful manual copy. When people stopped using it, literally nothing went wrong or changed, no one needed it, but now everyone got back 15 minutes of their day. But people resisted because "we've always done it this way."
As another poster said, grain loss is more likely with these less-hand-labor-intensive methods, and people can overvalue the loss of that small amount despite the time and energy savings of scythes. So people might think, "I'll lose 3% of my harvest doing that, I can't afford that" except they'd expend 15% of the energy harvesting and thus that 3% loss is more than balanced out by the 85% time savings and the reduced work load. You can spend a fraction of that saved time making up the 3% difference in a hundred other ways.
People are very resistant to change. A lack of education produces lapses in logic and critical thinking and thus people won't evaluate the change in the right frame of reference.
Well, with a sickle you hold what you cut, and then you bind it together, so the grain doesn't fall on the ground. With a scythe you will have to somehow pick it up and organize in such a way that you can later collect it (without much dirt stuck to it etc.)
NB. In high-school, I worked one summer cleaning and otherwise maintaining the local after-school building. It had a huge lawn behind it, which I had to trim with a scythe once every few weeks. So, I thought I knew how to do that reasonably well...
And then, one day, some years later, me and few friends of mine went on a trip into the mountains, and we put our tent, as we later discovered, on some farmer's field. He got mad at us, and wanted us to cut the grass for him, as a form of compensation. Using a scythe on an incline, as opposed to flat surface is a... whole different story. I lodged it into the ground a few times, and then the farmer almost killed us :) In the end, we bought him some alcohol and left.
So, the moral of the story: scythe might not be always the best tool, and in some situations it's far from obvious how to use it efficiently.
A high speed processor And lidar with digital blade angle control will probably make it work effortlessly on an incline too.
Taking inspiration from your nickname, how do you explain the many technical aspects of Japan that are still stuck in the 90s? They surely know how to look around and they surely know better things have been battle tested for decades in other countries, and yet...
I mean from a capitalist point of view, a farmer that uses scythes will outperform ones that use sickles (according to this website anyway). So there's something else going on.
The Future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. William Gibson
What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run it?
The skill tree depends on awful lot on what you care about, and don't assume that western "high tech" solutions are the best, because they're the most complicated.
From a "Built out of locally available resources, with minimum energy, and robust repairability," it's hard to beat a scythe or other similar tool.
And I guarantee a well built scythe will still work, if tolerably cared for, long past the last of our over-complicated tractors rusting in fields because the right software to update the firmware to allow you to start the engine after changing the oil was trying to talk to some server that no longer exists...
Unless you're making this argument. I can't actually tell which way you're arguing for.
In terms of joules spent per blade of grass cut, a well honed scythe in the hands of a skillful operator is more efficient than mechanized solutions. If you have an area where you already have an abundance of agricultural workers, it might be that scythe is a better solution than having your agriculture sector being dependent on fossil fuels.
"If you already have a bunch of people doing back-breaking labor, do not even think about giving them efficient machines"
"Efficient" in terms of what outputs, for what inputs?
You can't just handwave the term as a synonym for "I think it's better!" - it actually does imply inputs, outputs, and depending on what you want to optimize for, you may get very different results.
If a scythe is genuinely better for the job than a sickle, great!
But in a country without a lot of infrastructure and without modern supply chains, I'm pretty sure a tractor is the wrong solution to the problem. Unless, of course, your problem is "how to burden nations with loans they will never be able to pay back so you can come in and take over."
Imagine a farmer in a region that exclusively has manual laborers gets a machine that makes a hundred laborers' already meagerly paid jobs obsolete. You now have a hundred angry unemployed laborers and a prime suspect.
Yes, this is exactly what the Luddites were about (iirc). But you can't just barge in and make people's jobs obsolete. I'm sure even the scythe is seeing resistance because it can make a single person do the work of three others.
That said, something needs to be done to improve quality of life and reduce poverty. There need to be a lot more better paying jobs in the global South, but it seems that only China is willing to invest in e.g. the infrastructure required for that.
You have to incrementally improve. You can't jump an economic step.
I'd love to have everyone have no labour to do and be served by robots but let them eat cake doesn't work in reality.
You can absolutely jump economic steps. Many countries never got wide deployment of wired telephones, and never will. They skipped right to wide deployment of mobile phones. Many of those same countries skipped right past desktop computers in every home and laptops to replace desktops and have gone straight from limited computer access to the mobile phone replaces desktop computers.
You certainly don't need to hit all the economic steps, but using capital to reduce labor doesn't make sense when labor is much less expensive than capital.
By economic steps I meant you have to generate enough capital to afford tractors. This is a good stepping stone.
Working in the field is difficult, yes, but the western world still hasn't figured out an answer to the question "what happens when we run out of dead dinosaurs[1] to eat?". Until it has, any idea to not exacerbate the problem until we figure it out is, in my mind, a good idea.
[1]: fossil fuels, with poetic license
>What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run it?
There used to be an easy answer to this, now it's not politically or morally acceptable to support: colonization. Colonization is what brought modern farming practices (and their accompanying massive yields) as well as the development of the infrastructure needed to support it and other developments.
My guess is that's because people don't like being colonized. "Modern" industrial farming is also depleting the soil, so I'm not sure the jury is out on it actually being "better" than local practices.
Insane that a country that hasn't invented the scythe yet has also produced one of the authors of the "Attention is all you need" paper.