CoachHuman food production manages living things at two floors of the matter cycle:
- crop growing: managing producers — wheat, potatoes, vegetables, fruit — for their organic matter (Proposition 40.3);
- livestock raising: managing consumers — cattle, sheep, pigs, hens — for their production of matter (Definition 41.4): milk, meat, eggs, wool.
Farmers manage the conditions this book keeps meeting: soil minerals for the crops (Remark 22.5), feed for the animals — the whole ledger of Problem 41.1, run on purpose.
Examples
Example 43.2 (What a wheat field is)
A wheat field is a managed environment (Proposition 35.1) tuned for one producer: soil restocked and loosened for its roots, sowing timed to Proposition 9.5’s warmth, weeds — rival colonists of Chapter 39 — kept out. The harvest is the plant’s seed store: grain, the packed lunches of a million never-to-be-sown wheat plants, diverted to bakeries.