The rise of the robot farmer
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
Figure 3 on page 279 explains it. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224830979_Ecoeffici...
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.
[...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..
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.
It makes sense to me that farmers are best placed to optimize for current outputs (and probably poorly placed to optimize outputs).
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.
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.
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
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).
Neither of those has to be a forgone conclusion.
https://www.wired.com/2015/11/can-you-teach-a-coal-miner-to-...
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.
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.
Edit: of course this gets downvoted, because econ gibberish is certainly more valid than observed reality.
my understanding is that other than the top 10% or so, average income is not keeping up with inflation
https://static.businessinsider.com/image/59bc19b538d20d7f378...
https://seekingalpha.com/article/92689-over-the-past-100-yea...
Note in figure 3 the gains since 1950 have been a lot less than from 1920 to 1950. 1950s and afterwards the gains have been a lot less.
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).
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.
The cheapest loaf of bread I can buy is 36pence or $0.47
A 250 g pack of butter is £1.45 or $1.88
A 450 g jar of thin cut orange marmalade is 49p or $0.64
This is from Lidl.
And you don’t have to tip the cashier
/s
A receipt in Australia for example will display total:$10 including $0.90 sales tax. it is illegal to display a price that doesn't include it.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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"?
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.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/victorian-di...
Modern agricultural technology sounds fascinating.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Efficient, pleasant, and dystopian all that the same time.
> 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.
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.
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.
It doesn't save time? Oil? I don't understand your reasoning here.
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.
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.
Priorities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Usually technology makes them more efficient and more 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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
Happy to answer any questions.
Can lasers kill weeds at the root, or do you just keep them "mowed" down to size with repeated applications?
There’s a few techniques. You can cut the meristem or you can heat the weed. If you can explode the physiology, they don’t grow back.
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.
Like, can the robot move down the row as fast as a human weeding by hand? Can it carry a car battery and weed for an eight hour shift?
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.
And regular sweeps means you won't be seeing hundreds of weeds per square metre, certainly not once the primary crop's established.
I recall the Bosch weed-stamper robot from a few years ago were pretty happy with ~ 2 weeks per second stomping rate.
Edit: oops, I guess this should be directed at the small robot company, not the space bots with laser company.
But price erosion in the parts is dramatic and the software baseline is rising.
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?
Note that the laser weeding in the article is researchware — not a commercial product.
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?
Asking for a friend :-P
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.
Farming isn't horrible. Programming Enterprise Software isn't that hard. Safely doing robots in the real-world is.
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.
There is already a lot of technology and automation on big farms.
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?
https://www.wired.com/story/when-it-comes-to-gorillas-google...
If you prefer a story not on wired (sometimes it shows a subscription nag for me) - https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
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.)
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.
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...
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.
So how far is the tipping point for some crops, and then most?
It costs even less if you cut out the middlemen (supermarkets, distribution, etc) and buy directly from the farmers where possible.
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 needed. What crop would this be?
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
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.
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!
The comment was https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/20/space-ro... if anyone's curious.
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.