Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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Who needs the latest computer technology? Amazingly, people used to compute by hand. Just slum it a little and use something that was state of the art for 1990s. Plenty of Intel competitors can beat that.

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Farmers are in a competition for revenues. Better tractor technology growing more food with fewer workers. If all your neighbors are growing 200 bushels whenever you grow 100 bushels, you're going to die.

AWS simply won't be competitive with 90s era computers. Modern farmers won't work with tech designed in the 90s either. Sure, farming might be slower than computers at advancing, but its the same general thing. Computers (and tractors) are durable goods, they can last 20 years if you need them to. In practice, people replace durable goods regularly, because the NEW model is that much better than the old model.

So from that perspective, the economics between the computer world and farming world are probably the same. The group with superior technology will get superior revenue at lower ongoing costs. For computers, that's less power-usage for the same amount of computations (requests per second or whatever). For farmers, that's fewer workers picking your fields for the same amount of crop.

> So from that perspective, the economics between the computer world and farming world are probably the same

This totally leaves out the risk factor of not finishing harvest in time. In northern climates, if you don't finish, for example, by early September, the remaining crop may be unharvestable. Thus you could lose half your crop, totally.

So the economics are not at all the same.

Farming has to scale down. Big Ag which includes tractor companies, input companies, pesticides/herbicides companies and GMO seed companies are like a cartel. They completely control the market.

When you have 2000 acres and it’s a single narrow harvest window, it’s not possible unless you use herbicides and inputs and reliable traited seeds and even harvest is time by desiccating with..surprise!..glyphosate, one realized with depressing clarity that the real farmer is Big Ag. It’s their world. And the rest of us belong to them.

The reality is a bit more complicated than that.

>Farming has to scale down.

Then how are you going to feed everyone?

By the time I left the farm for college, the productivity of the American farmer had increased by almost two orders of magnitude for the 50 years beginning when my grandfather homesteaded in 1911. Improvements in technology, from using tractors instead of horses, modern cultivating techniques (strip farming, idle land cultivating), fertilizer increased yields and cut prices substantially.

When I was 3, my dad and uncle, who were partners in the farm, purchased a tractor for the equivalent of 1200 bushels of wheat. 15 years later, that same tractor would have cost 9500 bushels of wheat.

It isn't so simple that giant companies, whether it be oil, big ag, energy want to make profits. Clearly they do. But when we all insist on buying and driving cars and complain when gasoline prices are too high, there are overall economic forces at work that tend to create opportunities of scale, resulting in Big Ag and Big Energy. The consumer and the hungry mouths are all part of the equation.

I see it as a sign that we are way past our carrying capacity. Automating Ag would help secure food supply but when automation takes over, economies of scale don’t matter.

Most of the commodity crop isn’t food but feed and fodder. Shifting to a predominantly vegetarian diet would also help.

We have a myth of abundance due to economies of scale. It is very costly and is really not working out. Ditto with subsidies. All this is possible because of other enormous powers working invisibly.

When goods reflect true cost of production, then consumption will come down as will wastage. Time for a reality check.

Your parents and grandparents probably could make a living out of land and farming. But most farmers today need credit to buy high tech equipment and likely hold second jobs. What’s wrong with this picture?

It is really hard to follow this argument. Smaller-scale crop farming doesn't just feed fewer people; it may also make poorer use of the land. It's hard to see how going backwards would help anyone.

It will make people pay more for food. Is that such a bad thing? There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Yes, it will do that (which is bad) and also it will probably make poorer use of the land itself. What exactly is the goal of doing this? Immiseration for its own sake?

1. Why is paying more for food a bad thing?...the true cost of growing food..a bad thing?

2. Soil gets depleted. Water is wasted. Inputs and tillage destroy soil structure. Pesticides and herbicides destroy habitat and bio diversity. These are the other costs of cheap food.

3. Please explain to me what you mean by ‘poorer use of soil’? What is your metric for best use of soil and sub optimal use of soil?

4. The goal is regenerative ag so that we can keep growing food for a long time and presence habitat and biodiversity.

When you kill the golden goose, you can have roast goose for one day. And that’s that. What’s the use of that?

Given fixed inputs of soil and water, extracting more usable crops is strictly better than extracting fewer.

I think you may be stuck in the naturalist fallacy.

Small scale Ag is the opposite of Factory Farming. The latter relies on economies of scale and a long supply chain. The former has a shorter supply chain and tries to grow on demand.

Factory farming grows commodities, not food. It exploits labor, soil and destroys habitat. It keeps farmers in debt and they have to keep running faster to stay in the same place.

While more can be grown in the same acre and with the same water(presumably), it includes inputs like pesticides, herbicides and large machinery. It concentrates power in a few hands. It reduces plant varieties and is tied to speculative markets. It requires subsidies and keeps farmers on knife’s edge.

Maybe the spoon fed notion of abundance that comes from the lab and through chemical means..through mining and reliance on fossil fuels...through long supply chains, labour exploitation, subsidies and massive carbon foot print is a fallacy. Might it be that you are mistaken? Please reconsider your POV.

You aren’t making a very clear argument. I think what you are arguing is that modern agriculture does not capture its externalities so any supposed productivity improvements are not as valuable as they seem on the surface.

I’m sympathetic to that argument but if that is your stance you need to provide some evidence towards it. Otherwise you are fighting the very real benefit of the caloric argument for modern agriculture with nothing but buzzwords.

Help me provide evidence. I honestly don’t know where to start.

Bayer fell 40% today as verdicts come rolling against Monsanto’s glyphosate and round up. How do you think large scale factory farming Ag will survive without chemical warfare on soil? You can’t sustain that level of hubris without chemical intervention..which we now know is cancer causing and deadly to environment. And. It’s just the tip of the ice berg...

What does all this produce? Corn and soy that goes to feed anyways? Is calorific surplus the same as nutrient availability in diets? HFCS is a by product of corn which is inedible for humans but goes to feed hogs. Which in turn brings about an avalanche of pig poop which has run offs and poisons our water.

I already know that I am digressing. Where do I even begin? Ask me questions. I am full of answers. I don’t know if I can satisfy with ‘evidence’. Ymmv.

Monsanto seems to have made people believe that there are two choices: cancer or starvation. Entire Ag complex is designed around round up ready crops, gmo seeds, secondary food dependent on the primary fodder aka ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’, as it were...an Ag system that is based on go big or perish. Economics state that when you go big, food is cheap. But isn’t there a cost to it? What good is a 500k tractor to a farmer growing on 1-3 hectares(as it is in most of the world)? We are addicted to cheap food. It’s cheap because of economies of scale and certain unpleasant consequences. It’s quantity over quality.

Glyphosate is almost certainly not a human carcinogen, but, more importantly, glyphosate isn't the topic of this thread. Ag tech is: things like sensor-based control of computer-configurable combine harvesters. These devices generally increase yields for a given input of water, soil, and energy. So, if you're going to begin somewhere, please begin by explaining how those increased yields are a bad thing.

Note that I was specific to crop farming; I chose my words carefully. I'm not interested in debating CAFO meat here; it's not the topic of the thread.

The topic of this thread is economies of scale wet scale of farming. And so yes, we should talk about everything!! Including CAFO meat. Where do you think all the GMO corn and soy goes? As does storable commodity crops. You can’t grow lettuce and eggplants on 2000 acre farms using fancy JD tractors. How will perishables that can be harvested every 60 days be picked and stored and transported and sold?

So yea..large scale Ag is geared towards commodity crops that go to feed livestock and all the sundry by products like ethanol and HFCS etc.

Those ‘increased yields’ aren’t even human edible. It only increases meat and factory farmed meat that taints our water and has a massive carbon foot print and methane. So I am asking you..what are YOU talking about when you think of scale?

A diversified food farm can net anywhere between 1000-40000 bucks. Commodity is anywhere between 45-120 dollars(corn-sugar beets). Why do you think JD makes air conditioned tractors for commodity that nets $50 and not for higher value vegetables? Because you can spray broadacre pesticide for mono crops. Pollinator dependent food cannot abide by chemicals that kill the pollinators.

I don’t know what ‘almost certainly not’ carcinogenic means but I will concur and call it glyphosate based products that are known to cause cancer.

Agtech doesn’t create anything for food crops. Almost always for commodity crops that can be 1. Stored 2. A single one time harvest 3. Traded at the stock market. It is a data play and a speculative industry. It’s neither about Ag nor about Tech. When we can trade spinach on Wall Street, Agtech will create scale appropriate tech.

I am not sure you understand the scope and breadth of Ag. Large scale Ag will falter because it’s not sustainable. At which point, only small scale Ag will feed the world, but our world is over populated. So we need Agtech for small scale farms and for that tech to be born, people must pay the true cost of growing food.

Farming uses tangible inputs and resources...almost most of them non renewable. It’s not like scalable replicating code. Why do you say it makes poor use of land? That makes no sense to me.

Smaller scale farming could take advantage of less fertilizer intensive growing methods. Right now, 60% of the world's total crop yield is the direct result of artificial fertilizer usage, fertilizer that is derived from natural gas and is non-renewable and polluting.

Intensive farming is also causing damage to the soil and underground water. You can have high productivity small scale crop but it requires more hands. Also we produce a lot of food that is never consumed but thrown away. Both the American subsidies and EU subsidies (CAP) were designed a long time ago in the aftermath of WWII. But I think, we are not ready for this conversation yet.

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