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Comment by sapote | Hacker News Reader

Two things:

* 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.

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Not all things are farmed like you seem to think. I own a commercial wild blueberry operation. Knowing this information, with less effort and cost, can improve harvesting methods and may do things like reduce the reliance on chemical weed mitigation strategies.

I'm not convinced by the Australian farmer.

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.

You are right. I've been working a bit with the software for water management (although related to measurements of humidity over the day). Local management of resources does increase yields and sometimes just saves the crop.

The Australian farmer might not, but the machine that replaces him will.

Only if the same machine has to run on every farm in the world, without the option of learning what local conditions are or having them configured.

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.

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