I'm concerned with the environmental impact of:
"...farmers looking to measure soil temperature or moisture could affordably blanket an entire field to determine how to efficiently plant seeds or water. "
Littering chips all over the place?
"...farmers looking to measure soil temperature or moisture could affordably blanket an entire field to determine how to efficiently plant seeds or water. "
Littering chips all over the place?
Maybe you mean everyone growing their own food? That's not sustainable.
* Sure, seeds germinate with water and warmth. But that's true today. In the words of an Australian farmer quoted in a research paper a few years ago: "Mate, we don't need a chip to tell us the soil's dry."
* There are other paradigms of agriculture that are actually sustainable. Agroecology is a good example of an alternative scientific paradigm for agriculture, one that thinks of agriculture in ecological terms.
Microclimates are a thing. Water is not evenly distributed across any sizable plot of land. Being able to tell where the water is (or more importantly isn't) can surely help deploy resources more efficiently.
But, I'm a desk jockey, and hope to never, ever be a farmer.
Machines operating farms in Australia can easily just assume the soil is dry, like the farmers do, as long as they don't also have to operate farms in Louisiana.
Traditional agriculture is about the least productive way to interact with Nature.
That's where I see smart technology playing a role. Industrial agriculture involved building farming techniques around the machinery we have available. We "just" need to invert that approach and build smart machinery that enables us to glean food from highly-productive ecosystems.
I disagree: in a well-designed system there may be a lot of labor in the beginning, but it should fall off within a year or two to a very low level, much lower than conventional farming.
(I admit a lot of "Permies" don't seem to set it up this way.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fertilizer
Details and other topical information can be had here:
"Toby Hemenway - How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but Not Civilization" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo
Long story short: even a grossly inefficient process can produce massive growth if you have a torrent of free energy.
But I would argue that all these practices are part of the aforementioned "traditional agriculture".
In any event, you haven't made an argument that "traditional agriculture" is more efficient than applied ecology (Permaculture is an (the?) exemplar.)
Yield per acre is greater in a Permaculture farm than in a traditional farm, often by as much as an order of magnitude or more. Inputs are fewer too.
More importantly, under Permaculture the soil improves over time, while in traditional agriculture it is degraded and eventually becomes desert or wasteland.
Those kinds of posts -- while sometimes relevant and valuable when they have actual numbers behind them -- should be held to a more critical standard on HN than they often are, IMO.
What about the knee-jerk cheerleading? How does that express more and deeper interest than discussing potential pitfalls? I don't know about anyone else, but when I code I spend more time thinking about what could go wrong and how to address that, than admiring the parts that work perfectly.
When someone gushes at the mouth about how "awesome" it is that it took many very talented people a lot of time to make a toaster play music, the heretics are quiet already. What more do you want?
There seems to be a trade-off of chilling effects here, on the one hand, nobody would show off things they made to a community that just bashes it, on the other hand, nobody would show off their serious thoughts to a community that just wants fluff.
> sometimes relevant and valuable when they have actual numbers behind them
Oh, "actual numbers". Do you have any actual numbers proving they aren't held to the standard they should be held to? If you do, I changed my mind, I now want actual Egyptian hieroglyphs of a seer announcing you making that claim; I can make up arbitrary, oddly convenient demands too.