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now if we wanted to we could get up from our desks and open the refrigerator

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and find it full of cheap and delicious calories from every food group yep just

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[Man grabbing a sandwich] like our ancestors before us we always have a snack on hand to er wait

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so where's their refrigerator where are the boxes of microwave popcorn where's their

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microwave oh so this wasn't always the way things work yep believe it or not

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growing food and getting it to people is hard and it used to be way way harder

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[Man working in dirt] we've gone from scratching with sticks in the ground to plowing to irrigation

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having tractors to having refrigeration and it took a lot of crappy and

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tenacious humans to get the job done the heroes of this story are often unsung

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nobody gave a Nobel Prize to the person who invented a pottery wheel or the

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heavy plow and nobody even knows the genius who invented the waffle iron

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crying shame but this is the story of how we use technology to feed ourselves

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and hey we're not going to focus exclusively on the nifty gadgets that [Man cutting crops]

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saved us some sweat and hard work we'll also talk about the way agriculture has

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made human civilization possible and we'll talk about population growth

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leisure time and why anybody ever domesticated sheep believe it or not sheep [Caveman in forest with sheep]

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didn't always follow humans like sheep each new agricultural technology is

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about making food with less effort which is arguably a pretty worthwhile goal but

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all these new technologies did come with a big fat environmental price tag cue

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the ominous music very ominous well done well done humans have been doing this

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whole agriculture thing for a while now no big deal just about 12,000 years of

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work here's a quick rundown of the main points we're going to hit as we take

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this tour of Agriculture agricultural technology is kind of a big deal the [Boy reading the newspaper and eating a sandwich]

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reason there are seven billion people on the planet and the reason we can eat a

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hamburger for $0.99 granted it's not great hamburger but you know 99 cents

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and before agriculture hunters and gatherers used some pretty sweet

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technologies to get their food things like bows and arrows and fishing nets

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[Caveman cooking food] are the only reason our ancestors survived if they'd starved instead well

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we wouldn't be here yammering about them right now

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then came the Agricultural Revolution it was pretty slow you know for a

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revolution very few decapitations - mostly just lettuce heads people had to [Lettuce head sliced with guillotine]

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invent new tools like ARDS and hose that let them domesticate some yummy plants

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when the plow was invented everybody got serious about farming they domesticated

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larger fritters to pull wagons and plow started big irrigation projects and

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[Elephant plowing through the field] built greenery to store their food for a long time agricultural technology stayed

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pretty much the same those folks in the Middle Ages wouldn't give us much they

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were too busy fighting off White Walkers or something like that then the

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[Flying green witch and 3 men screaming] Industrial Revolution started putting machines on the farm ouch that's gotta

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hurt mechanization change the industry - refrigeration meant that frozen meat

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could be shipped long distances without spoiling and barbed wire helped keep

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[Cows by the side of the road] huge herds in the American West yay for frozen dinners and from the

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1950s on the world went through the Green Revolution and no that's not a

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militant environmental activist uprising it's the ability to grow more food than

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ever before using fewer resources and we have some breaking news for you

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[Man holding a waffle iron] Cornelius Swarthout patented the stove top waffle iron yes well okay not

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breaking news it did happen in 1859 whatever all right now you know and our

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work here is done

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