Why farm?

With the hat-tip to Ineffable Island: the origins of farming are in private property.

Farming became a grand way to scale up a healthy and prosperous population. But - as Diamond famously noted - the farm was not so grand during the Neolithic nor into the Bronze Age - arguably even the Iron Age (until the Hellenistic era). Back in 5000 BC it was most nonobvious to the average farmer that they were doing any better than the local hunter-gatherers.

The article correctly points out that village tyrants weren't the reason for the enforcement of a farming way of life. Inequality hadn't kicked in yet. UPDATE 8/9/2020: In 4400 BC, the elites ate steak.

The article tracks closer to Rousseau. What the farm brought to a Neolithic populace, was stability. It brought to them private property; and not - pace stupid modern Leftists - alienable "capital". This was nothing more or less than the promise that, however mean your hovel and however difficult your land, it was still yours, and your posterity's.

It wasn't a life everyone wanted. It still isn't. Even in near-modern Parias / North America, multitudes of European (mostly Scots-Irish) settlers drifted into the hills to live like the Indians, sometimes with the Indians. But the settled life was a life that a family man and a family woman were willing to gamble on. Their kids might live longer and better. In the end, they proved to have gambled correctly.