Or maybe the guy that "knows how to solve the problem" is solving some other problem, not the actual problem.
I count three wine makers among my friends. None of them machine harvest their own grapes, nor will source machine harvested grapes from other growers. It would be very bad for their respective brand images.
Some of both. Machine harvested grapes have a lot of field run, leaves and twigs, etc, and also the grapes are not as gently handled. So you at least have to keep the larger pieces of cruft out of the fermentation vats. But marketing image is also a big part of it, rightly or wrongly, which is all top-line dollars, less cost of harvesting crew, of course, but it pencils out. We are talking premium wines here, not two-buck-Chuck.
In Spain and in Portugal grape harvesting machines are common. They are also used for harvesting olives. The vines have to be planted in hedges. The machines straddle the hedges and gently shake the tree with rubber flippers. The vines have to be ripped out when they become to brittle.
We have mechanical harvesters in California but I haven't seen any that are gentle or use rubber flippers. Mechanical harvesters typically shake the trees/trunks a small amount but quite quickly. For grapes the shaking might move the top of the vine a foot or so at several hertz. The shaking is strong enough that most grapes are plucked off the stem merely because of the weight of the berry and the whip-like motion of the shaking.
The newer style bow rod machines use multiple UHMW rods bent into a question mark like shape. A large number of materials were tried but UHMW is the strongest material that could be found for the application. If adamantium or vibranium could be sourced I'm sure it would be used.
> “I expected farmers to be quite luddite about the adoption of new technology,” he [Ben Scott-Robinson] says, as he packs Rachel away.
I actually assume farmers are very welcoming of technology. They are hard workers and good business men. Usually technology makes them more efficient and more money.
> I actually assume farmers are very welcoming of technology
They should be, especially wrt to automation, considering farmers have been the most prolific in hiring undocumented workers while at the same time being some of the most vocal republican supporters. WAY less cognitive dissonance.
'a lot of them' means exactly nothing. How many? Do you have some numbers?
Last time I checked, the dept of labor was saying that about 40% of all agricultural workers are illegal immigrants and United Fresh Produce Association between 50 and 70 percent. So yeah, a lot of them don't use 'legit' systems. It must be very hard to cheer for building 'the wall' while employing illegals and getting federal subsidies. That's why I have great faith in farming automation as it would provide some well deserved relief.
Farmers is plural - there are many of them and they do not agree. The farmers hiring illegals are not the same ones against building the walls.
I do know a farmer who have stopped offering more wages when they didn't get anyone to agree to work for $25/hr - meanwhile he can find illegals who will work for $15. (Compare to what walMart pays, he isn't trying to hire engineers)
Two differences — and I’m not saying they’re “good” or “bad” because I refuse to claim I understand economics well enough — is that money flowing to undocumented workers is likely to be untaxed and money flowing to foreign citizens who neither live locally nor spend much locally will have some sort of impact on inflation, as there will be less currency circulating within the nation doing the employing.
Correct, it helps the farms remain profitable. My wife is a winemaker and even with the guest worker program they are not able to find enough workers. The salaries have gone above $20/hr, though the way overtime works is different and requires a lot more than 40 hours of work (for now). Don't have the time to put together a well referenced document, but the inability to hire workers at what I feel is above the value of the work is a real problem.
I joined an AgTech firm 3 years ago - this is my commentary, not the view of my company or anyone else there.
> I actually assume farmers are very welcoming of technology.
The answer (at least in my experience) is a bit more complicated.
> Usually technology makes them more efficient and more money.
...because this sentence isn't really true.
Yes, farmers are hard workers and if they aren't adequate at business they fail, as the industry is....weird (high capital expenses, large variability that is outside your control). They also tend to be much older (it's not unusual to find a 60 year old farmer that is getting excited because their father is considering retirement and leaving them finally in charge of the farm). And they have been targeted for new technology long before the current data- and/or robotics- oriented trends, so they've heard plenty of grandiose claims that weren't matched by results.
Adopting a new technology is almost always pricey - either it applies to the field, so multiply the price by the acres and it gets quite large quite quickly, or you apply it to equipment, which tends to run $50K-$100K and have to last quite a few years)
Weather is the biggest variable in farm output, and it's both hard to measure and impossible to control, so knowing if a product works reliably requires testing in all sorts of weather conditions, which is VERY hard to arrange.
Trusting the benefits is also difficult - anything tested in Nebraska will find that Idaho is completely different - different soil, different weather patterns. Even if the product IS tested everywhere (and it isn't, not in sufficient detail and over sufficient time - remember that variability?) the farmers have been told that before - they'll want to see it, or see it from someone they trust to know their specific conditions.
Then there's the level of output. Look at GMO seeds - leaving aside any other controversy (for now), studies show they DO offer yield benefits, but whether that is enough to recoup the costs is a "that depends" kind of answer. When prices are low, the return value of yield is low, but the costs of whatever you used to increase yield is probably fixed.
When you add in the cost of adopting a new technology plus the low level of trustable benefits a healthy amount of skepticism is present. There's a reason most transactions occur between people with some level of established relationship - seed dealers, regional agronomists, etc. This means convincing a farmer is often a matter of convincing one or more of these other people first, THEN convincing the farmer.
My personal experiences found farmers more interested in adopting technology than I expected, but at the same time any limits that are encountered tend to be VERY hard limits. Until they've seen something recommended by someone they trust that is familiar with their local conditions, they won't risk a harvest on it, and even running a test strip of, say, 10 ft x 100ft is a non-trivial expense. So while they are more tech-adopting than I expected, and once they truly adopt something they tend to commit, they are not what most would consider "technology friendly" and have a respect for tradition and local relationships based on a history of significant financial pain when they defy it unwisely.
Thanks; that's the most valuable comment on the page.
In a way, that's much like people in any industry, they only trust people in their profession: Doctors trust only other doctors; lawyers trust only other lawyers, etc.
In a way it makes a lot of sense: Would anyone here trust a farmer's, doctor's, or lawyer's recommendation on something for your profession? If a doctor said, here's a much ergonomically healthy layout for server racks in a datacenter ... I would think that maybe it's healthier - not all claims come true - but I'd assume the doctor had no idea what is needed for datacenters or server racks. If another IT professional said, 'I'm using this and it works great', it would be a different story.
It's very simple. Farming is a business with very high capital requirements and very thin margins. If you can move the needle on margins, it is a huge win, and farmers will be all over it. All you have to do is prove that you move the needle on margins. Any person managing such a business is going to ask for very solid proof that your new technology pencils out.
Technology generally does not make them more money. Often technology gets forced on them whether they like it or not because some other farmers adopt it, lowering their costs and thus lowering the price of the already tiny margin crops being produced so they make the same as what they did before. They just get a small one time bump in income before the market adjusts to the new price. And now every farmer has to adopt it just to keep making the same amount of money they were making before, or in some cases to make less than they did before but if they didn't adopt it they would lose money.
Also, the idea of the hard working farmer is totally antiquated in developed countries. Almost all farms are huge monoculture cash croppers. The farmers sit in self-driving tractors looking at porn on their phones all day for a few weeks per year.
Farmers are likely one of the few professionals who ..if they work efficiently and increase productivity..will actually make less money. Because unless they sell direct to consumer, the supply chain is long and farmers are at the very bottom of it. Case in point: wholesale lettuce is $0.35 approximately. Same romaine in Whole Foods would be $1.40-1.70. And even in farmers markets, you would find buyers creeping till the end of market so they can get closing prices because we sell perishables. Something is better than nothing, right? We pay regular wages ..but we are at the bottom of supply chain. Everyone wants cheap organic food. Somethings got to give. Usually it’s farms giving up.
> This is the one note of darkness that enters an otherwise optimistic conversation. “This technology could be used in a completely different way,” he says. “You could have entire states in America with no people in them. The potential for what we’re doing to be used in the wrong way is there.”
What is inherently wrong or evil about this? If we could automate a state-size farm to feed everyone, isn't that a good thing?
That's why I'd be in favor of making vertical farming more prevalent- by making farmers physically closer to the coastal cities they serve the rural areas will be starved economically. At this point in time, it's my conviction that retribution for the present tyranny of the minority will best come through technological means rather than warfare or politics.
Vertical farming is a pipe dream for everything but specialized high-margin produce. There's just not enough space to grow staple crops in coastal cities. Those volume crops will always be grown in large open areas and then hauled in to population centers. And no, improvements in solar cell efficiency or whatever won't change that equation.
I've never heard this being proposed- most vertical farming startups with any true prospects tend to be just outside the cities, but substantially closer than other farms. The chief advantage in vertical farming has nothing to do with actually farming within a city and everything to do with shortening supply lines. Likewise, I've never seen any company propose that they could completely replace conventional farms, but it's worth noting that every crop that can be grown with vertical farms allows another crop to be grown on arable land.
It brings fresher produce. I guess I don’t understand your comment.
Short supply chain: If I harvest in the morning and drop produce off in the afternoon to a restaurant or sell at a farmers market.
Regular supply chain: especially with large corporate farms. Harvested and hydrocooled(in case of greens) within 90 mts. Transported to cooler. Goes to packer and wholesaler. Distributor and broker and then onto shelf space at supermarket. It’s alreadr 3-4 days old. Expensive with fossil fuel based storage. Being transported. Could go into trash as food waste if it isn’t in pristine condition. These are the costs of longer supply chain.
With tomatoes etc that can bruise when ripe, they are picked unripe and then given the ethylene treatment for ripening.its several days old and needs a lot of $$. And energy wasted.
Why would you say short supply chains don’t save anything.
Indoor soilless farming has possibilities. Higher productivity through benign GMOs is possible. Also I like GMOs grown inside controlled indoor environment ..esp transgenic so they don’t go rogue or feral with the natural habitat and wilderness. There are uses for vertical farming. We need that too.
I think your attitude is pretty shitty, and exactly the sentiment that people in those rural areas point at when supporting people like trump. They're not evil people. They're humans just like you and me and feel overlooked and forgotten. Your attitude proves them right
Did it ever occur to you that maybe I was one of those people living in a rural area at one point, and that's exactly why I have the attitude I have? I moved to one of the coastal cities in large part because I got tired of fighting with people in my hometown who insisted on shooting themselves in the foot with their resistance to change, and I'm not talking about the sort of pie-in-the-sky fantasies of the Y Combinator crowd. I'm talking about simple changes to roads to make traffic flow more bearable and building a new hospital to replace old, antiquated facilities that were literally falling apart.
> They're not evil people.
Don't put words in my mouth- I never said that. They're not necessarily evil, but they're definitely inept, and the only way they'll wise up is if they're forced to by circumstance, which is precisely what I'd like to see. The rural areas of our country are more like crack addicts who need an intervention. How far would you be willing to go to martyr your own life for an addict? At some point they need to hit rock bottom and learn how to sober up.
> Your attitude proves them right
My attitude has no bearing on how these people act or feel- the bulk of them don't care how I feel and have had the same convictions well before either a) the Trump presidency became a possibility and b) I even developed my beliefs on the matter.
Could mean local community farming hands will suffer from possible job loss and in turn cant make money the way they used to. If people lose those jobs where do they turn, people living in the rural communities do so out of cost or personal preference, so where do the former go if their income disappears?
I guess if you picture it more like in the movie Logan where its just a giant corporate run automated farm that displaces regular farmers who cant afford the setup that seems pretty dark and dystopic.
Crime, because there won't be a robust safety net to catch them. (In the USA at least) However, there is a robust police state to catch them when they are criminals.
There's nothing morally wrong with it, but our current government systems aren't built for a few corporate entites (because there's no way this is downscalable to small family farms) essentially owning both entire states and the majority of the nation's food production. That's one merecenary army away from corporate nation-states
So you fix the government. Fully automated farming seems an inevitability at this point, and the materials costs to build denser instead of wider will be prohibitve so long as we have perfectly arable land to throw combines at.
It sure can feel like you have to design your economy, culture, and society around an unchanging, unaffable government, but none of those are really receptive to bending around something as transient as the ruling class of a given age.
But to have a state with no people in it implies that people would not be allowed to enter it, i.e. it would represent huge swathes of natural resources wherein some smaller group of people would be keeping the general public out by virtue of it being private property. Forcing people off of land and into cities, thus forcing them to buy food with labor, is one of the primary means by humanity has been subverted from achieving its real potential. Empirically, the rise of more efficient machines has often been deeply linked to human bondage.
>Forcing people off of land and into cities, thus forcing them to buy food with labor, is one of the primary means by humanity has been subverted from achieving its real potential.
it is completely opposite. The fact that people can get a food to eat in exchange for the product of their thinking instead of being forced to work in the fields doing manual labor is what has been driving our civilization forward. An ancient/medieval agricultural village would have no use for Einstein whereis the modern city based technology civilization was happy to feed him just for Gedanken experiments.
How do you link machines to bondage? If you look at slavery from Sparta to the American South it's often had a large component of agricultural labor. Even things like serfdom where the serfs were nominally free but tied to working the land it they were doing agricultural work.
You're not wrong. But, human history goes back roughly 200,000 years. Slavery can only be dated back to 1860 BCE.
One could argue that the "bondage curve" -- if there is one -- is parabolic. I.E. human bondage peeked sometime during the Atlantic Slave Trade and has been going down ever since.
One could also argue that -- before modern machinery -- humans existed for nearly 200,000 years with no documented form of bondage.
I'm assuming (I don't know) the OP is referring to what some people call "modern slavery" -- in that the majority of the workforce has 0 social mobility. I think it's pretty absurd when people compare this to slavery during the Atlantic Slave Trade, but it happens.
Your arguments seem misleading - the existence of anatomically modern humans goes back roughly 200,000 years, but human history, i.e. the era with documented evidence starts with widespread writing that comes much, much later; first samples of writing is from ~5000 BC, but they're sparse enough to not be informative about social practices.
The very first documented law codes (2100–2050 BCE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu ) already mention slavery. We can't know how long slavery existed before that, since those are literally prehistoric times and archeological evidence is not sufficient to determine these relationships, however, as the current evidence shows that slavery existed for as long as we have documented form of anything, there's absolutely no reason to assume that for the 200,000 years slavery didn't exist and good reason to assume that it did exist for at least part (or even all) of that undocumented time, as in the absence of any other evidence it would be prudent to assume that civilization at 10,000 BC had similar practices as it did in 2000 BC instead of being significantly different for no good reason from all other documented human history - we have no historical evidence at all of a time in early human history without slavery.
What part of those laws that didn't pertain to agriculture (failing to plant/harvest) were about the penalty for raping somebody else's slave. So many measures of grain etc.
That does bring the notion that we can make some assumptions about slavery in prehistoric times; it seems a core part of society in early agricultural societies but we have not observed it so much in hunter-gatherer communities (except sedentary hunter-gatherers with higher population density, which generally do have slavery, so it's more about the settling down rather than food source) - purely for economic reasons; it's practical/useful to keep slaves for farming or mining labor, but not so much for sparse, mobile hunting/gathering parties. Raiding neighbours for "wives" i.e. sex slaves does seem to be a thing even in those societies, though.
It could be a reasonable assumption that the prehistoric agricultural societies had slavery just as early historical agricultural societies, but that the earlier hunter-gatherers, i.e. a major part of those 200,000 years did not have widespread slavery. Well, other than the "intermarriage" with neighbours (often likely not fully voluntarily) which predates modern humans, given the genetic evidence for the partial "assimilation" of neanderthals and other parallel hominids.
The problem is that "we" would eventually be "Amazon Monsanto Corporation". People can accept inequality when it is somewhat plausible that it is necessary, but transitioning to what would essentially be a kingdom would be a challenge for a lot of countries.
It is an interesting exercise to imagine a state sized "farm state". Essentially you'd have one city (the capital of the state) consisting of folks who administered the state, people who maintained farm equipment, farm operators, and a police force for patrolling the state to protect the farms from people who might trespass or try to steal crops. "Farmers" would likely be more like DevOps folks who would sit in an office with a few dozen screens showing the equipment status, perhaps views from the various pieces of equipment as it was driving around the various plots, maintenance status, etc.
Efficient, pleasant, and dystopian all that the same time.
This is the general trend that pervades tech. Using algorithms to automate business tasks is good, but using the same technology to reduce demand for unskilled, backbreaking labour is somehow bad.
I think its because it leads to uncomfortable future scenarios, like how the economy of the future will be completely dominated by skilled and educated workers, and there will be much less requirement for unskilled labourers.
In Michigan we've already got family farms with a man, two sons and a single employee handling 10,000 acres. Robots driving tractors, trucks and combines would allow that to expand 5-6X. In turn that would lead to a reduction in farmers of up to 80%. This is a trend that has been running for close to a hundred years. Remember at one time a quarter of America's population were farmers and now it's under 2%.
The immense productivity gains in agriculture have driven down food costs, which improves the standard of living of everyone. It also frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor in the economy.
> frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor in the economy
That's the ideal, in reality too many of these people live in areas where there are no other opportunities. They are also often fed the line that the job can be brought back.
Put simply, we've observed generational shifts to higher-valued jobs in urban areas. A farmer, coal miner , etc who loses their job today is unlikely to re-skill & move to other industries
> A farmer, coal miner , etc who loses their job today is unlikely to re-skill & move to other industries
Don't confuse what is the current outcome with what has to be the outcome. Those individuals might not reskill in todays environment because of a combination of receiving an insufficient amount of the value they produced in their wages (preventing them from having the resources to retrain themselves), as well as social programs for reskilling being severely limited in both funding and how they constrain how and what skills are trained. (preventing gov't resources from retraining workers).
I'm saying it can't be done at the current rate of change. There are just too many people caught off guard, compounded by technological & automation adoption too rapid for them to adapt.
I think you may underestimate the scale of the problem. Why so many people in the center of this country voted for a catchy tag-line on a baseball cap.
I agree with you on the rate of change, and the scale is only becoming bigger, and worse with student loan costs. Imagine 10-15 years down the line when a generation of workers needs to invest in some other skill set, and are still paying off their original loans? If we want to continue to advance as a nation/civilization we need to build in a social/economic way for people to afford potentially multiple major learning opportunities that can happen at multiple stages of life, without having to commit to massive life/lifestyle on the line risks.
It can't be this program that gets hauled out into the light occasionally, constrained by industry, geography, time, and whatever else gets thrown into the mix to constrain the program cost - it ends up costing us all more (in money and social instability) to not address the problem.
In theory. In practice, this has lead to collapse of rural economies, rampant poverty, and epidemic drug usage amongst rural populations. As to driving food costs down, that's trivially disprovable. Loaf of bread in 1950: 12 cents. Adjusted for inflation that's $1.26 currently. A cheap loaf of white bread costs substantially more than $1.26.
Edit: of course this gets downvoted, because econ gibberish is certainly more valid than observed reality.
First, my local stop n shop sells a loaf of white bread for $1.29 and that's not even a sale price. Second the average income has gone up by more than inflation as well so you would expect the cost of staples to go up accordingly.
No because the average person can afford a lot more bread now than they could in 1950. But bread is not the best argument as it’s cheap to make even in the 50s. Go buy a roast chicken and compare that price and you’ll see a difference
Average income hasn't even kept pace with inflation since the 70's, go take a look at a graph of income inequality over time if you're curious where all those productivity gains went, you prove my point regarding no measurable drop in food prices (incidentally a loaf of bread is closer to $2.00 here), and would anyone care to take a crack at the larger criticism, namely total economic collapse of vast swaths of rural America or is "well, actually" over the price of a fucking loaf of bread the best HN can do?
You're the one that was calling the bread argument invalid and "trivially disprovable." Also, average income has more than kept pace with inflation since the 50s which is the arbitrary starting point that you chose in your first argument, but shifted to the 70s in this counter for some reason. That still doesn't help you as the avg income in 1970 was 10556.03 (39081 in 2017 dollars) and 50321 in 2017. (source https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/AWI.html)
A cheap loaf of white bread costs substantially more than $1.26.
Actually that's about exactly what it costs at Walmart. I wanna say it's $1.28 but I'm not 100% sure. Granted that's literally the cheapest loaf of bread you can buy not an average nothing special loaf of bread.
Food prices are confusing. Back in the UK I could get cheap loaves of bread for 55p ($0.71 at current exchange rate), while here in Berlin I see them for €0.59 in mid-range brands for a slightly smaller loaf that works out as $1.08 when adjusted for size as well as current exchange rate.
The cheap loaves of bread in australia are $1 (that's in dollarydoos - so it works out to 0.71c in the US.) There's no state sales tax beyond that -- and the minimum wage is 18.93 dollarydoos (13.38).
frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor
But what if they don't want to? Yay for consumers but throwing people into economic limbo is a Bad Thing. That's like looking for the next record-breaking swimmer by randomly throwing kids into swimming pools.
But pure capital allocation efficiency isn't a good indicator of social well being, just as infinite sugar sounds momentarily delightful until you think about diabetes.
That's kind of irrelevant to my comment, unless you consider workers part of the "capital" that is being allocated efficiently.
Even if you do, allocating capital (and workers) efficiently usually eventually leads to better social well being than allocating it inefficiently. (Perhaps reversing the inequality makes the historical examples more obvious: allocating capital and workers inefficiently leads to worse outcomes.)
But note well the word "eventually". There certainly is room for doing better at helping with the social well being of those dislocated by this process...
Efficient how? Finding the leader of the grand "race to the bottom" and moving the work there?
Maybe the workers should be as free as capital in seeking a country that benefits them the most. Then it'd be a race to the top because people can just leave your abusive country for a place that sees them as human beings.
The economy as a whole does not matter. It is not a person, it does not have any moral or ethical value. The only people who benefit from "the economy as a whole" growing are people who have positioned themselves as parasites who extract wealth from everyone like bankers. People want healthy, security and happiness. "The loss of your job, home, lifestyle, culture and heritage is irrelevant. Move to generic urban cell block #45725 and acquire a generic cubicle placement in order to procure generic toxic soyloaf to avoid starvation." does not produce health, security or happiness.
Go out on your own and the a mountain man in some remote place and live on cheap land. Then you can take your health, security and happiness into your own hands.
It will be much harder for people to extract wealth from your investments if you have none. It will be much harder for the government to tax you since you have very few things to tax.
I know it takes capital to start but that is the world we live in. Everyone has already claimed everything. The system is world wide and looking to expand to Mars and space. (unless you move to Alaska, I think they still give free land away)
>Then you can take your health, security and happiness into your own hands.
No, you really can't. If you are white and try to create a self-sufficient rural community you are going to get Waco'ed. But even if that were not the case, it doesn't help any of the people we're talking about. Some random farmer or coal miner is just getting buy and has no way to buy land and fend for himself. Without his job that everyone is so desperate to take away from him, he can't keep paying the loan on the scrap of land he has now, how's he going to buy "cheap land" in "some remote place"?
Except most people don't do higher-valued labor, we mainly do completely pointless busy work either because someone somewhere thinks there is a chance they can extract a large amount of wealth from having that pointless busy work be done (every tech company on the planet) or because a government has taken money from everyone else and given it to people to do pointless busy work so we can say "unemployment is only X%". Nobody would pay the millions of useless bureaucrats if they had a choice, they only get paid because the government takes money from everyone else at gunpoint to give to those bureaucrats.
More to the point, I think you are incorrect about the standard of living impact. 150 years ago almost everyone could eat safe, healthy food. Now access to safe, healthy food is incredibly limited, in many cases impossible to obtain without growing/raising it yourself. We've traded our health and happiness for pointless gadgets, that's not an unambiguous improvement in standard of living. With the knowledge and technology we have now, families could easily provide 80+% of their own food with almost no work (and I mean what we have now, no need for robots of the future). Instead of having a tiny number of farm jobs providing massive amounts of garbage "food", we should have a huge number of tiny "farm jobs" producing good food in people's backyards.
No, you either have an incorrectly negative view of the past or don't realize we're talking about developed countries. Hunger was not an issue, and malnutrition was more an issue with the wealthy who could choose to eat expensive things they didn't realize were bad for us.
managing giant monocultures with a few giant machines (that may or may not be human controlled) is not what this article is about; it is about the huge potential that smallish robots have for farming. More diverse crops, less pesticides, less damage to soil, less energy use, mixed instead of mono cultures. Really exciting if this takes off, such a win for the environment, the landscape, and ultimately for everyone of us
Sure, this might allow family farms to expand but it could also monoculture operations to diversify and become efficient through decreased pesticide and water use.
Unlike what you would expect, small robots do more damage to the soil not less. Damage to soil is not linear with mass, A massive robot will do twice as much damage where it touches the ground (wheel tracks most likely, but there are other choices), but it will touch 10 times less ground to do the same work so the total averaged over all the land is much better.
For the same reason, tracks generally end up doing more damage than wheels: you get somewhat less damage while going through the row, but they touch/damage far more ground when turning and that adds up.
Yes. Not as much as a heaver machine, but the damage is done. Of course their are also process to heal that work better on a human footprint (or deer hoofprint) than a machine print.
Soil displacement is a function of machine weight AND surface area of tires/treads. Additionally, I'd expect the sharp edges of steel treads to disturb soil much worse than a similarly-weighted tractor with rubber tires.
Without doing extensive calculations, my anecdotal evidence is that I've seen bulldozer track "scars" from a single path that are decades old, while the damage from thousands of bicycles collectively veering from a paved path onto grass appears to heal itself in a year or two.
You say the bicycle healed in a year, but you didn't measure that (this is a guess, but is seems reasonable). It isn't enough to say the grass appears green, is it as thick and growing as fast as untouched grass nearby.
A single track every 30 meters where nothing grows is less impact on the overall field's growth than 30 tracks every meter where things still grow but not as well.
The damage to the soil occurs mostly when turning, especially 180 degrees at the row end. The extent of damage depends on the wheels ability to articulate to the proper angles. The tracked vehicle can't change angles and pushes everything around. A bicycle is a cycle and has none of the turning drag encountered in 4 wheel vehicles or skid steers.
This seems a bit confusing - in the context of agriculture, when I hear "damage to the soil", then that implies (to me) that we're talking about the difference between the long-term soil erosion caused by plowing/tilling/cultivation versus growing different cultures for which the process requires less of such invasive activities and so doesn't erode the soil as much.
The effect of large tires vs small tires vs tracks vs feet is insignificant and irrelevant, it's a rounding error compared to the effect of whether those tires/tracks will be pulling a plow/till or not.
This is especially true for clay type soils that don't rebound as quickly or fully when compacted. When compacted beyond a certain pressure, the roots can't break through any longer. Small robots won't cause this though, it requires pretty high pressure. Consider an even smaller robot like 1-in wheel base, would that cause compaction?
That's simply not true. Low axle weight and low pressure both reduce soil compaction tremendously, to the point where it no longer causes any at all when you get small enough. This is easily measured. A garden tractor is 1000 pounds, even with normal turf tires you get no measurable compaction unless you are in mud. I can drive around my garden all day long and a penetrometer confirms absolutely no difference.
It isn't just pressure, total weight matters too. 1000 psi is WAY too high. Keeping ground pressure as low as 10 psi is generally the recommendation for heavy equipment, but a person walking might get up as high as 20 psi and doesn't cause compaction on soil with a reasonable organic matter content (5% or more I think?). Here's a good explanation: https://extension.psu.edu/avoiding-soil-compaction
Not when you are using pneumatic tires. That gives you the pressure applied to the air in the tire, not to the ground. The tire pressure determines ground pressure.
Lowering tire pressure widens the base of the tire, changing the contact area(A) and adds some shock absorbing. The fundamental equation still applies to static conditions.
The reason I thought 1000 psi was low is explained on 278, the ground bearing capacity columns minimum value is 20 mpa or 2900 psi. The numbers in your link are dynamic pressures at depths of 14 / 28 inches. The area where the force is applied increases as the stress is distributed in the soil. The 2900 is a surface value.
No. Air is a fluid. Like all fluids, it exerts pressure equally in all directions. A pneumatic tire is not simply a shock absorber, nor does it need to deform for its internal pressure to change the ground pressure. It is transferring force to the entire tire that would be transferred to the ground if you used a solid wheel to contact the ground. You are applying X pounds of force to Y volume of air, which is distributing that force across the entire internal surface area of the tire. It is not the contact area of the tire to the ground that has force exerted on it, it is the surface area of the interior of the tire. This is not hypothetical, measure the ground pressure, change the tire pressure and measure again. It is trivial to verify for yourself.
Thank you very much for the explanation. I'm not really familiar with the empirical methodology or equipment required to measure pressure between two surfaces.
We already can do all of that, we don't need robots. Most farms have been no till for years now, the idea that fields are plowed is an anachronism. This is more tech wankery, people with a particular technology trying to shoehorn it into being the "solution" to problems that are already solved easier and cheaper.
[...More diverse crops, less pesticides, less damage to soil, less energy use, mixed instead of mono cultures.]
We already can do all of that, we don't need..
Question: If we can do all of that already, why isn't it being done (edit: assuming it isn't) ?
Its being done all over. The biggest ecologists were always farmers, who pay the first cost of soil erosion, soil damage and energy. They fail only on the mono-culture front, though its extremely common to mix crops in hilly ground but that's for erosion control.
And now the potential to use less chemicals with robotic application is taking off even with large farm equipment. Cameras identify a plant off-row as the tractor traverses the field, and either plucks it or spritzes it with a microdose of herbicide.
Fair enough, I should have worded more carefully - it's an area I'm largely uninformed in and should have worded it more as a question; re-reading it sounds like an assertion so i added a tweak.
It makes sense to me that farmers are best placed to optimize for current outputs (and probably poorly placed to optimize outputs).
Small amounts of it are being done, most farms have been no till for years for example, cover crops are the norm now instead of some weird fringe thing, stuff like that. It is not done to a greater extent for two reasons. One is because it is a business and the primary (often sole) concern is making money, so anything that isn't the normal way of doing things is avoided. There are serious financial incentives to not try anything better. In order to actually get a pay out on your crop insurance if your crop fails, you have to have followed all the "approved practices" to the letter. So if it says "spray your potatoes with fungicide every 5 days" and you can't prove that you did, you lose a few hundred thousand dollars this year. This sort of thing makes it hard to change even if you want to.
Second, there's active intent to prevent people from knowing how to do things better. Almost all agricultural inputs are produced by a small number of large corporations. If farmers knew they could cut their fertilizer to 10% of what they buy now, stop buying pesticides, and spend less on fuel those corporations would lose a lot of business. So they pay "agronomists" and "soil scientists" to mislead farmers and keep them on the treadmill. There's lots of very deliberate FUD about organic agriculture, permaculture, etc, and when you've got millions of dollars invested in land and equipment, a little doubt goes a long way.
A single employee for 10,000 acres is nothing. (I'm assuming that the three owners would stay on with or without robots.) That person's salary is a rounding error compared to land, seeds, fertilizer, water, equipment, etc.
I think the benefit of automation for commodity crops (rice, wheat, etc.) is almost nil. Labor isn't driving the cost for these crops. However, automation for labor intensive crops (like berries or certain fruits) is a huge opportunity.
To get to those labor efficiency numbers we've made a lot of food quality and environmental sacrifices. TFA specifically mentions automated laser weeding instead of herbicide/GMO. Fertilizer microdosing is also mentioned which would greatly help fertilizer runoff pollution. I'm sure you've heard of other problems with factory farming, many of which are labor saving practices.
The cross section of farming, public health and environmental impact can't be reduced to a commodity spot price, at least not in our current economic system.
It seems like you would still want those 4 people, just to keep an eye on what's happening with those 10,000 acres, whether the robots are working correctly, selling and marketing their harvest, researching new opportunities for improvement, etc. With just 4 people, you also have a worryingly high bus factor if one gets sick or takes time off for any other reason.
Lots of them do. It sounds like you may live in an urban area. Check out your local farmer's market for a local farm organization. (In Seattle, we have one called Tilth Alliance.) They may publish a guide to all the local farms in your area, and many farmers will respond positively to, "Hey, I'd like to learn about what you do!"
Alternatively, look around your state/province for what agricultural products they produce. In Washington, for example, there are distinct farming areas for wheat, apples, cattle, etc. Go visit those small towns, post up in a coffee shop or local bar and ask the people there. Most small town folk don't mind showing around a few polite strangers from time to time (in my experience.)
The point about entire states being used for agriculture is interesting, and I guess whether you see this as utopic or dystopic really depends on the nature of the owner of the land. If the government owned the machines, land, and produce, and socialized the gains, this seems like a utopic solution, although obviously there is potential for abuse and bureaucrazy. On the other hand, if a corporation owned it, it would seem very bizarre and symbolic of income inequality.
I wonder if Marx was simply too early. Let the machines be the proletariat and let all of society be the bourgeoisie, and maybe communism can work in some industries.
That was a pretty inspirational tale about the startup the guy founded in terms of purpose and possibility and application of technology. For me it's better than anything I've heard about recently in America, though I am not an expert in this.
Not the OP, but I'd just point out that all you should need to do is get the stem above the boiling point of water, which is well below the combustion point.
What wavelength to use for that could be an interesting discussion. Makes me wonder whether you could use masers (microwave lasers) rather than optical lasers for a more efficient "heating the weed from the inside" effect.
Not OP, but my take on this is efficiency and quality will be superior to a human (or will be very, very soon).
Speed of movement / detection / destruction cycle isn't as important as cost per unit of land patrolled - these are things you can easily scale up if the price per device is low enough. Compare & contrast cost of humans.
Right now the dwell time of the laser is slow like in the order of a second per weed. And there can be hundreds of weeds per square metre. So this needs to improve — and there’s lots of good ways to improve it. However, as the parent says, just leave a few bots out there and you easily compete with human operator cost.
I've been thinking about a suite of robots on the residential level that could not only mow the grass and edge it, but also shovel snow, and perhaps eventually prune plants and pick the harvest. Would such a suite (or a base plus a suite of attachments) be practically affordable soon (say, cost less than $5k retail)?
Edit: oops, I guess this should be directed at the small robot company, not the space bots with laser company.
What kind of remote operation/visualization interfaces do you have for deployed systems? Does your company receive the alerts/visuals/notifications or do the farmers that buy from you receive these?
Do you want farmers to eventually be able to operate the fleets you sell them, or would you prefer to sell the entire operation to farmers and manage the fleets yourself?
Farmers may not fix them but they will operate the robots on farm. Already, tractor drivers are skilled operators of GPS controlled semi-autonomous machines. They’ll be the people who drop the robots off, review their task plans, stay in range of their heartbeat, swap implements and refill stuff.
Hi! Would lasers work for Bermuda grass infestations? I am forced to till sections of my organic field to get rid of them and I would like to go no-till as far as possible.
Now for a bit of hubris: anyone else reading this feel that building a robot that could do pest/weed control and harvesting is almost a triviality compared to say, fixing enterprise software to maximize customer purchases and ad revenue?
What are we all doing? Seriously, why can't each of us take a year of our lives and automate all the most awful jobs in the world?
Still, image recognition is effectively a solved problem at this point for AI. Maybe there are still problems with notation and terminology that prevent widespread adoption?
My hypothesis, incidentally, is that it's really hard for an AI to tell the difference between human and ape facial features at all; they're too similar. It seems easy to us because a big chunk of the human brain is devoted to face processing. The AI pretty much just knew "primate face," and knew that pale primate faces were usually human, but with a dark primate face it could only guess.
(Which doesn't excuse Google for releasing it in that state, of course.)
There are many different weeds, and some look a lot like non-weeds. Weeds of the same species often look different in different area. Companies are working on the problem, but you can't train on weeds in one area and go to the next.
Building yet another database/analytics platform is trivial compared to automating even the simplest real-world tasks. Because in the real world, you don't have full control of everything, and you can't just hit the reset button or restore from backup.
I do enterprise software, I have a small farm AND I just completed a masters in robotics.
Probably wasn't intentional on your part but I feel like you just left a Baby Ruth in my pool.
Farming isn't horrible.
Programming Enterprise Software isn't that hard.
Safely doing robots in the real-world is.
When I read articles such as this one I still see a lot of hype.
I'm not a Luddite or anything, bu I think the future of sustainable, productive agriculture lies in agronomic science, not laser-robot overlords or the next OGM fad.
If driving a car is less demanding than driving a tractor, let alone a tractor coupled with equipment, since we're still some years away from generalized self-driven cars, what can we say about farming in general?
There's a lot of work to be done that would make agriculture sky-rocket in terms of efficiency and environment protection.
The last great changes in agriculture have been to lock away the farmer from the equipment, managing software, and crops they use, and to make it easier for large companies to guarantee sales and futures markets to gamble on predicted yields.
In the past, the food industry was in between farmers and consumers. Now it seems independent farmers are the middle man corporations want to remove: an annoying part of the chain of production.
So this has nothing to with technological advances, but in feeding the hype that everything can be automated with ease. This is a publicity stunt for the zeitgeist of the AI dream.
And, by the way, pest and weed control is not a triviality. Not if you want to do it right. Automation is not the mere substitution of humans: it's also the adaptation of the chain of value so that it can be automated. It always comes with a cost that is sometimes underestimated.
I've been interested in setting up setting up some sort of micro farm in my flat (led based) for a few years. Anyone got some good resources for the novice micro farmer? (I like robotics/automation as well so if I could blend that in it would be cool)
Related: Can someone from the industry share what is the current status of vertical farming? Is this considered the future or the verdict is not out yet? Any good people/startups/articles to check out?
No one is making a profit. Yet. Energy costs a lot. Even led has gone great strides. Operational costs are expensive and lettuce won’t rake it in. Marijuana growers are likely killing it but I am pretty sure they won’t be tripping over to share data. But a head of lettuce is around $1.50. A lb of marijuana is like ..what..$250 now? So.
I eagerly await the introduction of fully automated farming. Not, however, on farms. In my own garage. I see no reason I should simply let a "farmer" purchase the automation gear and then collect profit after wasting tons of energy in transportation. There's dirt, water, and sun at my house. There's no reason a robotic farming situation couldn't be shrunk down and made into something private individuals or small families could own to provide for their own food needs.
There's nothing stopping you from planting a garden today. It's not a huge amount of work, and any robots that become available in the next few years will only marginally reduce that labor.
It's not a huge amount of work, but it is a significant time investment. I'm thinking more of a nearly-sealed box that is entirely automated, a family could purchase for a couple thousand dollars, and then it produces food for a few years. It's not so much robots in the sense of things which drive around the landscape that will improve that sort of things, but the work in the 'vertical farming' market. Isolated systems which eliminate the need for pesticides, herbicides, etc, can greatly reduce water usage, can optimize light cycling, maybe even automatically perform selective breeding to a degree, etc.
You're very unlikely to get a couple thousand dollars of food over a couple of years out of even a large "box," where the box is approximately the size of a bedroom. This is one of those cases where it's cheaper to simply buy the food from someone who has economies of scale on his side.
It costs even less if you cut out the middlemen (supermarkets, distribution, etc) and buy directly from the farmers where possible.
Vertical farming is not an economical method of producing useful quantities of food. The people pursuing it appear to be motivated by utopian idealism and inaccurate cost estimates.
Any future "farm in a box" is going to require about as much labor as a garden does today. Someone has to clean the filters, wipe off the mold, plug the leaks, replace the corroded parts, etc. Those activities won't be practical to automate in our lifetimes.
A lifetime is a long time. I have no trouble believing enclosed agriculture is uneconomical now, but look at the trends: robots and AI are set for a long run of improvement, daytime electricity is likely to get much cheaper with the progress in solar power (when prices have been roughly level since 1970), people increasingly want local and fresh food without pesticides, harm to the ecosystem is an increasingly big deal, and so is variability from climate change. A couple of more speculative possibilities: median income might start going up again (it roughly doubled in 1950-1970) and nuclear power could make a comeback with the new startups tackling it, for even more abundant cheap electricity.
So how far is the tipping point for some crops, and then most?
No, it really isn't. Place organic matter on the ground in fall or early spring. When the last frost has passed, plant seeds through it onto the ground. To do grow enough for a family of four is not even one day of work for one person. During the summer and fall, pick food and eat it. That's it. A robot isn't going to save enough time to be worth it. Using your palm-top to tell your robot tended garden to pick 300 grams of lettuce for you and then going out and picking it up from the robot isn't noticeably faster than just picking the lettuce yourself.
>but the work in the 'vertical farming' market.
That is not a real market. It is just techno-dystopian sci-fi. It has no purpose, there are not enough benefits to offset the huge downsides.
Citation of what? That seeds grow if you plant them? It isn't a crop, it is vegetables. You would hopefully plant things you want to eat, but I do potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips (rutabagas if you are american), celeriac, broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, peppers, beans, peas, corn, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, melons, onions, garlic, leeks, beets, and some salad stuff. I'm sure I'm forgetting something but you get the idea. Plus there's the perennials which obviously you don't have to plant every year like asparagus and most berries and herbs. I spend precisely two days per year on all non-harvesting activities but that's because I start everything from seed instead of buying started plants so one day to plant the seeds and one day to transplant them 2 months later. It is cheaper and lets you get a lot of heirloom varieties your local nursery probably won't carry, but it is more work. I use only four simple non-powered tools assuming you count a popsicle stick as a tool. If you are going to grow your mulch because you don't have trees or neighbors doing it for you then you'll have to have something to cut your mulch crop with too.
If you replace "in my own garage" to "in my own backyard", then that's the problem I'm working on with my side project: https://automicrofarm.com/
One of the sibling comments has it exactly right: even if you get robots that can do all your gardening tomorrow, they will only marginally reduce the labor. Design in gardening matters, a lot. I wrote more about that recently: https://blog.automicrofarm.com/vertical-farming-and-automati...
> We’re an agri-tech start up commercialising a deceptively simple idea: small robots not big tractors.
> Because unfortunately big tractors are neither efficient nor environmentally friendly. Currently, 95% of energy is used ploughing. And ploughing is only necessary because of heavy machinery crushing soil.
> We are building robots that will seed and care for each individual plant in your crop. They will only feed and spray the plants that need it, giving them the perfect levels nutrients and support, with no waste.
> This level of detail allows you to be kinder to soil, kinder to the environment, more efficient, more precise and more productive. It’s the best of all worlds. An increased yield, as well as minimal chemical usage. So you can increase revenues by up to 40%, reduce costs by up to 60%.
> Our robots are being designed and built by farmers, for farmers. Because we have spent the last year talking to you, we know you don’t want to buy robots. You are worried about the cost, and what happens if they break down. Instead you can lease our robots through a Farming as a Service (FaaS) model.
Obviously it may not be as good as it sounds. But it sounds amazing.
Also these quotes from the article about scale were interesting:
> The agility of agricultural robots means small farms with compact fields will no longer be at a disadvantage; independent shops and restaurants will be able to grow their produce on smallholdings efficiently tended by Rachel-like machines.
> ...
> “Most people think this is going to be expensive, is going to do everyone out of a job and is going to be good for the big farms, not the small farms,” he says. “It’s actually the exact opposite. The big farms are all about economies of scale: big fields, big tractors. We are developing small machines. I believe the extra production we need to feed the planet is going to come from small farms that can’t use those economies of scale.”
I love the idea of a farmer on 2 acres competing with Big Ag on price.
I'm slightly surprised the use of the laser is killing weeds instead of insects. There have been some prior efforts at killing mosquitos with lasers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser
Human ingenuity is amazing when applied to labour shortages.
The Black Death, Brexit, the recent American Immigration Crackdown. All of these events reduced the supply of labour, resulting in increased wages and productivity.
Goes to show that arguments about needing migrants and refugees from poor countries to fill labour shortages in the West do not hold water.
I am encouraged by what they are doing across the pond. Not so much stateside.
I have been trying to form a framework for a few years now. Small acreage farmers growing organically need automation.
Large corporate farms are already mechanized. As are most commodity crops. Speciality crops that need a lot of human labour and expertise..especially in organic operations need help from automation and robotics tech.
The trend I am seeing in the US is mostly data collecting intelligence. Everyone is doing something in AI or ML or blockchain. But small acreage farmers like me need more automation.
I have noticed that the trend in the states seems to be data collection technology which needs massive datasets. There isn’t a lot of care or use from small acreage farms. This is the biggest stumbling block for small farms(less than 100 acres) to be included in the big boys game.
We need small cheap robots that does a diverse set of tasks. At this point, for small farms, human intelligence trumps AI. But data is king. More money is made off data harvested from farmers than the actual produce itself. Because farmers sell wholesale but we pay retail for the tech.
We are lagging behind in the United States compared to endevours in the EU or down under. Not everyone can be a unicorn. Not everything has to be big.
In a way..we don’t have to try because we have super cheap migrant labour. For now. I will bet my bottom dollar that it will be gone in a few years time. What then? We are also spoilt for choice by the produce bounty from Mexico. But for how long?
As a small farmer who is interested in automation, a few thoughts : 1. I would like a robotic platform that can be modular depending on my operation. Diff farmers use diff methods. We live in diff zones and have diff pests and diff soil and diff water. One size won’t fit all. 2. There is more to farm labour than just weeding bots. 3. I need to own my farm’s data and be able to commodify it. 4. We need to be partners. Because bots are not farmers and the industry needs us to train them. Include us. I am the domain expert. Not the roboticist or the engineer. 5. I would pay upto 20-25k for a robotic platform with a certain set of features. It’s worth it for me. That’s because I have a smattering of interest about robotics and automation to know what’s possible and how much it would cost. I also know how valuable data is and I want to make money off my data. A seemingly expensive platform is still worth that to me..however, I find it very difficult to convince my fellow farmers. Why? Distrust. 6. Farmers distrust technology because we deal with perishables and tech we can’t control is our work rotting in the field. 7. Farmers don’t get enough respect. Not the farming concerns with 10s of thousands of acres or corporate farms that have lobbies and trade memberships. Not commodity farmers..but regular farmers who sell at the farmers markets or to restaurants. 8. Nobody works with us. They ask us questions and once funding comes through, they are being nudged towards larger farms. They won’t grow bitter melon or fenugreek. Those huge farms won’t grow the eggplant from Laos or India. Or that specific spicy hot pepper from some place in South America. Without small farmers, we will all be eating the same kinds of foods. Same variety of tomato or the same kind of sweet pepper bred for machine harvest and mass production.
I started out naive. I am not under any illusion anymore that I can design a small acreage robotic platform. But now I know what’s out there and how I can make it work for smaller operations. And how to integrate the many things we do seamlessly as a new kind of Ag for us. Afterall, in other countries..the average farm size is 2-3 hectares. And they feed local population. So my platform will be useful elsewhere even if it doesn’t gain traction in the states.
I also have realistic expectations of technology now. And people. I am excited every time I read about innovations across the pond. Maybe we will get it for small acreage specialty crop organic farmers here. Or maybe not. But when we consider global momentum, some really exciting things are happening. And it’s happening fast!
this doesn't sound like it's even in the technology's infancy. prototypes are being drawn up in the labs. they don't understand any drawbacks. when they eventually come up with something, inevitably it'd disappoint and fail. I can't see robots making the complex decisions of harvesting individual plants with all its variables involved, especially at the scale to not fail. This is much more than three years ago. This is a cheer leading fluff piece.
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