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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

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%.

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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.

The biggest efficiency gains would be from not being a mono-culture.

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.

I don't understand your comment. Suppose the robot is the size of a person or smaller. Does a person damage the ground by walking across a field?

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.

This. . . doesn't sound convincing to me.

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.

Username definitely checks out

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.

While I agree overall, soil compaction is something that large farms are starting to watch because it makes a measurable difference.

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?

All tillage is damaging to the soil. Period.

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.

Exactly, compaction is the result of pressure. If you're at <~ 1000 psi and there won't be compaction on any soil type in dry conditions.

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

Hm, my mistake, thanks for the link. Total weight is related to pressure through the formula: P = F/A. Weight is F.

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.

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.

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.

But is the juice worth the squeeze?

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.

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).

Neither of those has to be a forgone conclusion.

I don't disagree it can be done...

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.

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.

is that including the richest folks in the average or not?

my understanding is that other than the top 10% or so, average income is not keeping up with inflation

Median income adjusted for inflation, has been growing, albeit very slowly, for all groups, including the bottom quintile (+6.7%).

https://static.businessinsider.com/image/59bc19b538d20d7f378...

So you prove knieveltech correct, the price of bread has not gone down despite whatever productivity advances may have come about since then.

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.

I know this isn't the point of this sub thread, but in UKthe prices are:

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 includes sales tax

And you don’t have to tip the cashier

Why would you want it to include sales tax. If the government is taking a cut of a transaction the people should be well aware of it.

It's somewhat anti-consumer for the price listed to be different to what you end up paying.

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.

You can include the VAT on the receipt that the customer gets after paying. Most food in UK is zero-rated for VAT.

Your observed reality knows the price of bread in 1950, the price adjusted for inflation, but not the current price.

It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?

He actually seems to have something of a point:

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.

A loaf of good-quality sandwich bread can easily go for $5, but cheap white can be had for around a dollar in most places.

Really?

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).

Like what labor? Are they skilled appropriately to fill what's actually in demand?

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.

Almost nobody who loses their job wants to. It's still a net win for the economy as a whole that people lose the jobs that are no longer worth doing.

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.

I think you are romanticizing the past. 150 years ago most people were living subsistence lives, with hunger and malnutrition a constant issue.

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.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/victorian-di...

Do you know of any farms like that which do tours, or areas where there are a lot of people operating like that?

Modern agricultural technology sounds fascinating.

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.)

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.

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