The future of agriculture
economist.com
economist.com
1. Herbicide resistance. We now have weeds that are simultaneously resistant to many different modes of action. Even if one were able to eliminate the impact of pesticides on the environment, it is impossible to develop new chemicals and stacked herbicides faster than evolution can find ways to work around them.
2. There are other drawbacks to monoculture ag, namely soil loss, lower quality of soil structure/microbiota, loss of ecosystem services such as habitat, etc. Increasing our yields per acre is great but we need to factor in all of the externalities. I was glad to see mention of finding new ways to associate rhizobia with cereals, but that's a long way off and for the time being no one has figured out how to have agriculture avoid massive imports (even in organic ag) of nutrients into the system.
3. Exclusive focus on the biggest staple crops, with far more emphasis on quantity than quality and producing food that is necessary for a well-rounded diet.
4. Nearly all of these solutions ignore the possibility of using ecological interactions, unique spatial designs, intercropping, perennials and other agroecological strategies to reduce weed pressure, increase nitrogen fixation etc. These other techniques are far harder and are more difficult to commercialize, but if one wants to tackle "hard" problems in agriculture, those would be the ones to address.
Just to be clear, much good will come out of the technological developments, but for the moment they're primarily tinkering around the edges when really we need a whole-systems redesign for agriculture. I recently finished a PhD focused on optimizing decisions given all of the uncertainty/variability in precision ag systems, and what I ultimately concluded (at least for row crops) is we still have a long way to go.
Ken Burns The Dust Bowl is re-airing currently (it was originally broadcast in 2012). It tells the story of the combined impacts of: 1) massive immigration onto the high western prarie, 2) mechanised agriculture, 3) hitting a period of higher rainfall, initially, 4) a false belief that "rain follows the plow", 5) intensive crop development, 6) deep plowing of virgin prarie, 7) economic cycles and patterns, affecting lending, loan conditions, ag market conditions, 8) the response of farmers -- as crop prices fell, they planted more -- because this was their only source of income, and their pattern (or antipattern) was to try what hadn't worked, but harder.
The results were staggering. From 1934-40 depending on the area, but most especially over the Oklahoma Panhandle and surrounding regions, crops were lost, families bankrupted, farms reposessed, banks failed, telephone companies failed. And up to 75% of topsoil, a one-time bounty that accumulates at the rate of a few inches per century, was lost. Only 25% of the lost land productivity was recovered.
Human hubris in the face of humble dirt is a category error.
But we're not likely to see any story about a permaculture robot soon. Several years ago I started to (on paper) design a system to merely plan and track a permaculture-style farm/environment - and then abandoned it due to complexity beyond my capacity to model.
Monocultures in comparison are painfully simple things to manage - part of why they're so successful (commercially, at least).
3.5 billion people on this Earth are poor farmers. If we can design functional open source agricultural robots that can be built by anyone with access to a $300 3D printer (and I think we can) we could have a bigger impact on the world than every new Silicon Valley startup from 2016.
There is a serious issue with the fact that capitalists don't make things for poor people, because they can't afford to buy the solutions. [2] I don't want that to stop me though, so I'm working hard to figure out ways of funding this project that are functional even in our capitalist world. I think I spend more time thinking about economics and social systems than I do about robotics, since the technical solutions are trivial compared to the problem of getting people to fund valuable non-profitable work. But I think that is possible too.
Right now I am working at a robotics startup and solving problems like 3D perception, behavior, team management, handling my own bullshit, etc. My 10 year plan is to have a functioning system for homesteading with robots.
I'm really trying to make this happen.
[1] http://makezine.com/projects/3d-print-badass-rc-race-car/ [2] http://tlalexander.com/restless/
Do you need funding, ideas, people?
In the future I intend to tap in to crowd funding again, probably with a full robot as a development platform, and will check out grants and other sources of traditional investment.
I could use people, ideas, and funding, in that order. Funding is forever useful but I'm not willing to accept anything with strings attached at this point. I think I'm at a stage now where I've fleshed out a good enough basic plan that I need more people to work on it. I don't currently have bandwidth to organize much but I figure I will some time in 2017. For now I'd love to get a core group of people together to discuss the ideas, and see how we can develop it further.
The general idea is a zero marginal cost society. That is, one more day of society's needs can be serviced or produced at zero marginal cost. This would eliminate the need to work for survival as there would be nothing anyone strictly had to pay for. This requires that some technology be developed, and that a good reduced-consumption culture is fostered that values true freedom over endless consumption. The first incarnation would be an open source farming robot project that would allow small farms all over the world to support themselves with less of their labor devoted to farming. Millions of people could be freed up by open source automation they built themselves or purchased locally. Longer term this would be used to tell a story about how automation and openness can free all of us from the need to work.
If you want to chat more about this, my email is in my profile and on my website, below.
[1] FlutterWireless.com
You'll need to be more specific.
> So far I've only seen some hippies take it seriously.
There's a lot of that, sure. But in my experience, out of all the general nonsense going on in the world of organic agriculture, permaculturists were the most likely to avoid anti-scientific horse shit. That is perhaps not saying much, to be honest.
In regards to your 4th point, our cropping systems in Australia are a bit different to the states. We already grow crops in a rotation, Wheat, Lupins (Nitrogen fixing) and Canola. Depending on where your farming your might also be growing cover/summer crops.
For a whole-systems re-design, I think that beyond just tailoring genetics, nutrition, and herbicides to site-specific conditions, we need to be thinking about all of the interspecific interactions, spatial designs, and other natural processes that we can be harnessing. For example, we're currently constrained to operate farm machinery in a grid, or perhaps on contours. One way to improve that would be to start adding complexity to the grid. On a simple level, you could have one row of grains and one row of pulses as a means of breaking up pest migration. Slightly more complex would be to use intercropping or to perhaps co-locate crops that provide pollination services, moisture storage, or other benefits to each other. More complex would be to start using trap crops more frequently or taking advantage of natural seed predators with interspersed natural vegetation. Even more would be to incorporate trees (agroforestry) not only on the edges of the field but also within the field. Finally, once machinery is sufficiently sophisticated and the logistical hurdles are surmounted, you could break away from the grid pattern and start experimenting with other configurations such as concencentric circles or other shapes - the possibilities are endless.
We do grow crops in rotation in the states, although more in some locations than in others (about 15% of farmers where I'm from in Montana use pulses rotated with grains). Cover crops are a great option, though of course in dryland semi-arid regions early termination to prevent moisture losses is always an issue.
We've been using variable rate to tailor nutrient applications for a few years now[0], and have started contracting with a WeedIt to do spot spraying(major reduction in chemical application).
We've definitely discussed "reforming" some of our paddock structures to improve yield, or mitigate weed potential (sowing east-west vs north south). Although if you were going to commit to major production changes like that, you'd probably want to bundle them together. Changing sowing direction would mean restarting CTF, so you'd be best of doing another operation such as deep ripping at the same time.
We've experimented with wetting agents, as we have quite bad non-wetting soil, and the results have been quite good. It's amazing to watch the before and after[1]
Do you think we're going to need a shift in machinery before we can break out of conventional cropping patterns/methods? I'm still somewhat skeptical that a swarm farm type setup would work in our broad-acre situation, but I think a downsizing of machinery (1 * 60m bar -> 3 * 20m bar), could work if they also move to fully autonomous & electric drive. Although, automation for field operations is still quite "simple" compared to the logistics of managing seed/fert refils.
[0] A few example maps - https://hectare.ag/nooka [1] The effects being discussed here are different, but the video shows the same idea https://twitter.com/ipaddockapps/status/708066704954249216
Do you use / have you used a Yeomans' plough, and/or investigated keyline? These are well suited to broadacre remediation and improvement (compared to, say, the details around inner zone planning of permaculture). I've seen evidence of these techniques around the Hunter, near Yeomans' original property, and the methods tend to be highly regarded.
I actually work as an engineer/designer for a small business based in Queensland who build ploughs, including non-inversion deep rippers (somewhat in competition with Yeoman). We have in the last ~8 months sold a heap of rippers into WA in partnership with a local manufacturer, targeting clay pan breakup, pH remediation, etc. with a lot of success. It's interesting the way deep tillage and other mechanical soil management ideas are experiencing something of a renaissance out west at the moment.
All of these practises are also "low-tech". You'd want to use VR maps to spread your lime[0], and possibly clay (although it's fair easier to pick out soil erosion by eye as opposed to varying pH), so it's probably not needed.
Once you've sorted out the fundamentals, then it makes sense to start more precision ag. There's no point trying to grow a 5t crop when your roots can't even get down to the soil moisture.
[0] Example VR lime maps, pick Lime from the available layers - https://hectare.ag/nooka
I moved to the Central Valley recently and have been searching in vain for some technician type work in ag/soil moisture monitoring.
This is a passage from Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America. His premise is that viewing agriculture as an equation to be solved is fundamentally incompatible with maintaining the land's carrying capacity.
akiselev said in another comment, "How would you propose we study an ecosystem where we can't even isolate and analyze the majority of bacterial, fungal, and viral species let alone study or simulate their interactions with each other and crops at the scale of even a square meter plot?"
We already have the knowledge of how to sustainably farm land without irreparably damaging the ecosystem (although it is dying fast); we are simply unwilling to work as hard as it would take to do it and are hoping for a technological breakthrough from an expert to solve problems we can't even verbalize.
As the article talks about, this is largely because the old equipment and seed manufacturers, the ones the farmers trust for their farm, are finally starting to provide "smart" machinery and even cloud services with mesh sensor networks. Combine this with genetic engineering of nitrogen fixating bacteria, breeding guided by genetic screening, and all of the hard work that people like Norman Borlaug have done and will do and we will be able to sustainably feed our civilization without a high chance of running face first into an ecological catastrophe.
Despite constant technological progress, agriculture sadly remains one of the top contributors to global warming. Unless the whole concept changes I really don't see how we can avoid a global catastrophe.
Now we've got globalization resulting in much cheaper technology and expanded markets, artificial intelligence and machine learning, ultra cheap wireless communication, ubiquitous software, and last but not least, biotechnology. As the latter advances, it will kick everything into high gear, as it already has with companies like Monsanto and Climate Corporation. Even something as simple as eliminating nitrogen from fertilizer through genetic engineering or directed evolution would have a tremendous impact on the sustainability and ecological impact of industrialized farming.
This is a good time for farmers who are always at the mercy of so many variables which they are finally starting to dig into, quantify, and control. Farms, especially smaller ones, are almost always in debt that they have to borrow before every planting and a single underperforming harvest can wipe out the business so all this added certainty is going to do everyone a world of good.
I agree that we should be studying this area more (a LOT more), but there will always be existential risks with everything we do, regardless of how much time and care we put into our work. I for one refuse to let hundreds of millions or billions suffer and die when we have the technology to save them just because the unknowable risks offend someone's sensibilities. You and I will likely be dead by the time the consequences are felt, but we can't let all those hungry people die in the mean time just because of FUD.
It'll be interesting to see if California farms' debt balloons like this too as they have to borrow more and more to pay for water rights and infrastructure like wells. California is basically the US's fertile crescent so maybe there will be a lot more subsidies and federal assistance just to maintain food security as a national strategic goal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought
[2] http://www.theage.com.au//breaking-news-national/minister-de...
>RTDS has already created one commercial product, a form of rape
Whoa whoa whoa. Phrasing.
Maybe you should read it and find out, rather than be perturbed by a single word.
I'd like to see more study of natural ecosystems in such a way that we adapted the human behavior around the already-occuring processes, and less modelling of the planet around 20th century suburban design ideals etc.
one of the largest factors that I contend will emerge will be the rebirth of local food production, perhaps technologically assisted in some regions as needed, largely due to our passing of the "negligible shipping costs" tipping point as well as improved understandings of locality, microbial cultures, and multi-celled organism interactions etc.
I'm reaching here because I dont recall the details but I seem to remember reading about Indian grain production needing to industrialize in order to satisfy its near future domestic demand.
I'd love to get some recommendations for books dealing with large-scale food production (not saying 'factory' but rather 'national', for example) from an econ perspective.
"Climate Change" We are going to need to re-learn how to produce food locally, and as mentioned before by others: permaculture, not industrial technology, holds the key. The basic lesson of any polluting activity that destabilized our natural world in some fashion is that our activities need to be in harmony with natural cycles. General channel herbicides that affect the uptake of soil nutrition by plants (glyphosate, for example) are not things that should be used as they get into the water and eventually all plant life must deal with their effects, stunting any cultivars not engineered to withstand these effects. What is a "weed" to one person is "green manure" to another that builds soil. It may be a protector plant that draws insects away from crop cultivars, it may have symbiotic beneficials effects we are un-aware of. We need to step out of the lab and into the field and learn about the complex interactions of the real world if we are to truly learn how to live in harmony with the planet we are from and live upon.
Why do we think and behave as if we are not an animal species native to the surface of earth?
This article feels like a a discussion of weight loss that focuses solely on new trends in exercise while completely ignoring the role of diet. And, worse still, by ignoring that important facet of the problem, it seeks to create a moral justification for practices like GMO that many consider to be an unnecessary risk.
I can understand why the Economist would be biased towards increased production, since that increases GDP and fits into the capitalist notions of constant expansion, but optimization on the other side of the equation will be much better at helping us meet our needs for food in the upcoming century.