Harvest

Harvest (pronounced hahr-vist)

(1) The season when ripened crops are gathered.

(2) The crop or yield of one growing season.

(3) A supply of anything gathered at maturity and stored.

(4) The result or consequence of any act, process, or event.

(5) To gather (a crop or the like); to reap.

(6) To gain, win, or use (a prize, product, or result of any past act, process etc)

(7) To catch, take, or remove (animals), especially for food.

(8) To collect (any resource) for future use.

(9) In epidemiological statistical analysis, as harvesting effect, a method used to calculate the excess deaths suffered during certain events (and the subsequent decrease in the expected normal mortality rate as the specific conditions subside.

(10) To extract an organ or tissue from a living or dead body, for the purposes of fertilization, transplantation or research.

(11) In modern paganism, a ceremony held on or around the autumn equinox, traditionally the harvesting season.

Pre 950: From the Middle English harvest & hervest (autumn, one of the four seasons; period between August and November), from the Old English hærfest (autumn, harvest-time; August), from the Proto-West Germanic harbist, from the Proto-Germanic harbistaz (harvest-time, autumn, fall) (source also of the Old Saxon hervist, the Old Frisian & Dutch herfst & the Old Norse haust (harvest)), from the primitive Indo-European kerp- (to gather, pluck, harvest).  It was cognate with the German Herbst (autumn) and related to the Old Norse harfr (harrow), the Old High German herbist (autumn), the Latin carpere (to pluck), the Ancient Greek karpos (fruit) and the Sanskrit krpāna (shears).  Curiously, the use in cell biology to refer to the extraction of cell began in 1946, the same year it appears first to have been applied to the hunting and gathering of wild animals.  The earlier (and mostly dialectical) forms harvist, hervest, harst & hairst are all obsolete.

Lindsay Lohan with a pair of ratchet loppers, pruning cuttings for the potting shed, May 2015.

In the Old & Middle English, it was primarily a season name, the sense of the implied reference to the gathering of crops just something of tradition and the specific, separate meaning (the time of gathering crops) dates only from the mid-thirteenth century, the sense extended to the action itself and the product of the action only after circa 1300.  Early in the sixteenth century, harvest assumed the now familiar meaning exclusively and the borrowed autumn and repurposed fall supplied the season name.  Being more evocative, fall is better than autumn.  The figurative uses began to emerge in the 1530s, use as an adjective documented early in the sixteenth century.  “Harvest home” which included the “festival feast”, was a festive event celebrating the bring home of the last of that season’s harvest and is first recorded in 1577.  The harvest moon, dating from 1704, was that which was full within a fortnight of the autumnal equinox.  Harvestable & harvestless are adjectives; harvestability and harvesting are nouns. 

The New Holland CR 10.90 Raupe-HSCR Harvester: harvesting.

The harvester, agent noun from harvest and noted since the 1590s, was “a reaper", a device used to assist in and speed-up the gathering of certain crops and the variations were many.  The first (vaguely) recognizable ancestor of the modern combine harvester was the generation of harvesters (the earliest of which were horse-drawn and seem to have been in use since the 1820s although no patent was issued until 1835) first sold in 1847 and advertised as machines for the “reaping and binding field crops".  The combine harvester (often referred to as “combines” or “headers”, the latter a reference to the bolt-on attachments optimized for particular crops) is so named because it combines in one machine the four separate harvesting operations, (1) reaping, (2) threshing, (3) gathering and (4), winnowing, the (5) multi-function headers a more recent innovation.  The tractor and the combine harvester are two of the most revolutionary machines, partially responsible for huge increases in agricultural production, equally dramatic reductions in the farm labour force and the consequent acceleration of urbanization as a demographic trend.

2025 John Deere 9900 Self-Propelled Forage Harvester: 956 horsepower.

Modern harvesters are machines of extraordinary efficiency, one able in an hour to reap more than what would once have taken a large team of workers more than a day.  Mechanized harvesters were an early example of the way technology displaces labor at scale and because historically women were always a significant part of the harvesting workforce, they were at least as affected as men.  The development meant one machine operator and his (and they were almost exclusively men) machine could replace even dozens of workers, something which profoundly changed rural economies, the participation of the workforce engaged in agriculture and triggered the re-distribution of the population to urban settlements.  Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest innovation in technology applied to agriculture as just a one operator + machine combo replaced dozens of workers, multiple machines now go about harvesting which an AI bot handling the control and a dozen or more of these machines can be under the supervision of a single individual sitting somewhere on the planet, not so much controlling the things and monitoring for errors and problems.  Removing the on-site human involvement means it becomes possible to harvest (or otherwise work the fields) 24/7/365 without concerns about intrusions like light, the weather or toilet breaks.  Of course people remain involved to do tasks such as refueling and such but AI taking over many of these roles may be only a matter of time.

1981 Chevrolet Corvette: 190 horsepower. 

John Deere's yellow & green has around the planet for decades been a familiar sight in fields but it's not a mix often seen on the road; strange color-combos are not unknown but in recent decades factories have restricted not only the range of hues offered but also the ways they can be combined.  The 1981 Chevrolet Corvette (above) definitely didn’t leave the assembly line in yellow & green; that season, yellow (code 52) was available but there was no green on the color chart and while two-tone paint was a US$399.00 option, the only choices were Silver/Dark Blue (code 33/38); Silver/Charcoal (code 33/39); Beige/Dark Bronze (code 50/74) & Autumn Red/Dark Claret (code 80/98).  After taking in the effect of the yellow/green combo, the camel leather trim (code 64C/642) seems anti-climatic.

Maybe the Corvette's repaint was ordered by a fan of John Deere’s highly regarded farm equipment because JD’s agricultural products are always finished in a two-tone yellow/green (their construction equipment being yellow & black).  For the 1981 Corvette, a single engine was offered in all 50 states, a 350 cubic inch (5.7 litre) V8 designated L81 which was rated at the same 190 HP (142 kW) as the previous season’s base L48; no high-output version was now available but the L81 could be had with either a manual or automatic transmission (it would prove to be the last C3 Corvette offered with a manual).  Glumly though that drive-train might have been viewed by some who remembered the tyre-smoking machines of a decade-odd earlier, it would have pleased buyers in California because in 1980 their Corvettes received only the 305 cubic inch (5.0 litre) V8 found often in taxi-cabs, pickup trucks and station wagons; to them the L81 was an improvement.  The L81’s 180 horsepower certainly wouldn’t impress those in the market for John Deere’s 9900 Self-Propelled Forage Harvester, powered by a 1465 cubic inch (24 litre) Liebherr V12, rated at 956 HP (713 kW) (956 hp), the machine available only in the corporate two-tone yellow & green.  Like Corvettes which have tended to be quite good at their intended purpose and pretty bad at just about everything else, harvesters are specific purpose machines; one which is a model of efficiency at gathering one crop will be hopelessly inept with another and in that they differ from the human workforce which is more adaptable.  However, where there is some similarity in the plants, it can be possible for the one basic machine to be multi-purpose, the role changed by swapping the attachable device which does the actual picking or gathering.   

The Harvesting Effect

The harvesting effect (properly called mortality displacement) is a term from a process in epidemiological statistical analysis which maps and quantifies (1) a period where the human death rate significantly exceeds the predicted level and (2) a subsequent period when aggregate mortality is lower.  A harvesting effect is almost always associated with external factors such as war, extreme climatic conditions, famines or epidemics & pandemics.  Implicit in the model is the notion of a relationship of vulnerability between those who suffer an early death and the sudden change in external circumstances.  For example, when wars occur, there’s inherently the possibility of an accelerated death toll among those most likely to be serving in the most dangerous aspects of military service (fit, healthy young men) whereas when societies are subjected to extremes of heat or cold, it’s the frail and elderly who are most vulnerable.  The harvesting effect is a useful analytical tool because it can quantify the extent to which causation can be attributed: a subsequent drop in the mortality of a target population would suggest a high causal correlation because the heatwave, polar vortex or whatever, has in advance already harvested the expected victims.  That is rationalized as accelerated mortality, those who died as a result of the event were old and frail and thus likely soon anyway to die.  War-time and post-war data is interesting too for those studying not only the long-tail effects of physical injuries sustained in conflict but also those of mental illness caused by the trauma of the experience.  Historians can also use the data, where it exists with a high degree of reliability, to track the extent to which the causalities of war were civilians, something which in the West rose and fell between antiquity and the modern era before spiking dramatically in the wars of the twentieth century.

The harvesting effect is of great interest during and in the aftermath of pandemics and epidemics.  In the sombre world of public health policy, the harvesting effect is noted as one of the factors which can lead to pandemics and epidemics receding or even disappearing, the idea being the disease having already harvested the susceptible; those who remain are the strong who won’t succumb and the resistant who remain unaffected.  As a statistical source, the raw data of excess deaths is helpful too in determining the true death toll from a disease like COVID-19.  Difficult anyway in developing countries where in non-pandemic conditions there’s often a high proportion of deaths where a cause, even if known, isn’t recorded but in countries with highly developed health systems, many factors can mean the data is inaccurate.  That includes social stigma which in some countries apparently appears to some extent to have attached to COVID-19; it was certainly a factor in the early, misleading count of deaths from AIDS, the sudden spike in fatal pneumonia a sociological rather than a medical phenomenon.

Estimation of excess deaths against official COVID-19 deaths, published by The Economist, mid 2021.

A number of institutions accumulated the data-sets necessary to assess the true COVID-19 death toll and several, including the Financial Times and The Economist, collaborated to create the World Mortality Dataset (WMD) which contains both their statistical analysis and some discussion of the results.  At a time when the official global death toll was around 4.8 million, the findings published on the WMD (a perhaps unfortunate acronym) suggests a true number somewhere between 8 and 18.5 million.  Using the same statistical modelling, the death tolls for the previous four influenza pandemics (if happening now), they put at 75 million (1918), 3.1 million (1957), 2.2 million (1968) and 0.4 million (2009).  It certainly appears the official toll is significantly understated but the WMD does caution the usual caveats inhabit the margins: this is a composite of many data sets, capturing not only COVID-19 deaths (strictly speaking) but also those with some indirect association such as those suffering other conditions yet not able to secure timely treatment because the pandemic displaced healthcare resources.  It would be difficult to create a statistically robust formula to calculate relative contributions to death by various factors.  The method the WMD use they represent as:

Excess mortality = (A) Deaths directly caused by COVID infection

+ (B) Deaths caused by medical system collapse due to COVID pandemic

+ (C) Excess deaths from other natural causes

+ (D) Excess deaths from unnatural causes

+ (E) Excess deaths from extreme events: wars, natural disasters etc.

Running the COVID-19 numbers also produced some interesting finding of general interest in the field of public health.  There were some countries, those with natural geographic advantages and which applied stringent control measures, in which actual mortality was lower than that expected, the spreading virus (indirectly) turning the curve negative because the policies enforced had the side-effect of effectively eliminating seasonal influenza and its associated deaths.

The official COVID-19 death toll: 5,476,854 on Wednesday 5 January 2022, 13:42 GMT.