Farmer in 7000: Rice farming takes hold in China

The profession that made every other one possible — feeding the world for eleven millennia, from the first Fertile Crescent wheat to autonomous tractors. The English word "farmer" originally had nothing to do with soil: medieval Latin firmarius meant someone who paid a firma, a fixed rent or fee, and only around the sixteenth century did the word settle on the person working the land. The work itself is older than almost every other profession — roughly 11,500 years ago, communities in the Fertile Crescent began saving and sowing wild wheat and barley seed, and everything later called civilization was built on the food surplus that followed.

It remains the world's largest occupation. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization counts more than 570 million farms, around nine in ten of them run by families, and about a quarter of the world's workers still farm — under two percent in the United States or Germany, over half in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. No other profession spans a half-acre rice paddy tended by hand and a 20,000-hectare grain operation steered by GPS from an air-conditioned cab.

This page follows the profession from the first domesticated einkorn wheat through the seed drill, the tractor, the Haber–Bosch process and the Green Revolution to today's robotic milkers and driverless machinery. It covers how people actually get into farming when land costs more than most careers earn in a lifetime, what a working day on a mixed farm demands, the eight farmers history remembers by name, and how much of the job automation can realistically take.