What do you think are some ways to boost their voices and/or credibility? Seems like a no brainer to listen to these folks.
Many farmers are land rich, cash poor, labour costs eat up profit margins. Many will die. And with these farms, the knowledge. They will sell the land and retire on the proceeds as rich farmland is paved over.
What they need is accessible, affordable tech. And where their inherited generational and practical knowledge can be tested and validated and adopted by tech. It needs to be with trustworthy partners who don’t see farmers as future consumers but as collaborators and partners.
Current Agtech is geared towards commodity crops and industrial Ag. All farming knowledge that is soil and environment oriented comes from small family farms. Their goal is to keep the soil fertile. The purpose of a farming corporation is to make profits. Not soil health or environment.
By asking big Ag concerns to take care of soil, we are burdening them with a job they don’t want..but that requirement towards soil and environment should be part of the tech they use.
So the domain experts of soil..the ones who actually have dirty hands by working in the soil should be the ones who help create the tech. Right now, wrong allocation of responsibility to skill is what’s not working.
Farming is intuitive. A farmer tries to maintain the soil and make it better. Industrial Ag razes* down soil with each harvest and supplements With inputs and brute mechanical force, they bring soil back to a threshold that is bare minimum for cultivation. That’s why a farmer says that only sun, water and soil is needed to grow food. Industrial Ag needs inputs, machinery and data.
As a small acreage soil focused farmer, I say that we need soil, water, sun...and tech. Tech that would replace manual repetitive labour ..labour costs that is killing our profits can be boosted by small acreage automation/mechanization.
*i like to illustrate this with a personal example. When I wanted to redo my garden, I wanted to move a couple of structures, add a fountain, plant a few trees, remove some vegetation and put down a walking path with pavers.
When I called a landscape architect, he said that we will have to remove everything, create a blank slate and implement the landscape design.
That is the difference between farmers and industrial Ag.
In other words, are there problems that software alone can help solve or is it simply down to replacing some of the manual labor with robotics and smarter machines?
Software can be helpful but it’s enhancements contribute very little to the profit margins.
Take for example this cost analysis of orient eggplant for 2005(I picked this eggplant because it’s not a commodity crop grown by industrial Ag and is niche. In other words, it’s not like lettuce or strawberries or corn or soy)
http://sfp.ucdavis.edu/crops/coststudieshtml/BpEggplantOrien...
Check the percent of labour costs and capital/equip costs wrt operating costs. Software will help as part of the bigger systems approach, but at the end of the day, the urgent problem we need to tackle is labour costs and labour availability.
“Simply” automating the existing systems doesn’t seem the right approach either.
The energy loss comes in 3 different parts - water waste, extra fuel in shipping, and in energy to dehydrate. Everyone pays more.
The system solution would be to price the tomato solids, not the water.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781972
And this:
That’s a 5 month chunk of field work I can outsource to a Robotics As A Service type outfit. I like to divide chores by seasonality.(that’s how a farmer like me would see it..an engineer might not see that as optimal). It doesn’t require my knowledge or skill, it just needs horsepower. That’s capital and infrastructure cost and maint/labour expenses I can consolidate and probably will save.
It’s a diff set of automation when growing season starts. Of course, that flips when a farmer has winter/fall croppings.
To be honest, we have great soil in CA and I can’t speak broadly ..but almost every big farm will have their own system. Broadly, there is standard tillage, bed disc system and strip/conservation tillage in CA.
Strip tillage is often conservation tillage and sometimes used near Davis/Sacramento area where our wheat and tomatoes are intercropped..(our most impressive crop) In Salinas valley , our lettuce producing ‘salad bowl’, they have almost always had minimum tillage protocols. A sub soiler/ripper. I know a farmer who rips it in the beginning of the season and discs it FOUR times before listing.
You can’t really make a decision without evaluating soil, moisture and soil microbial activity.
Having said that..I am interested only in small acreage farm automation..that is sub 100 acres ..2-3 times bed flipping vegetable growing farms. I don’t have experience with industrial ag systems. That’s like factory production assembly line. They got all their ducks in the row. My interest is in automation for small farmers and market farms. It’s super sub optimized market.
I would recommend a minimal till-no till approach focused on soil health. Maybe rip the fields every 2-3 years. Single pass implements will reduce compaction due to machinery but when you make a light farm bot, compaction of paths between short semi permanent beds shouldn’t be an issue. The holy grail would be a no toll system. But it’s not without its issues.
So..to your question. A single pass Solution with implements on a gang. Yes. It’s possible. But you have to remember that this would mean higher HP. Upwards of 200-350. At which point, it defeats the purpose of finding automation for small farms. Which small farm can afford those mega tractors? It becomes a scale/$ issue.
If it’s electric, then HP decision is even more complicated because now you have to decide between draft implements or PTO implements. And as that adds up, so does the weight of the tractor/pulling unit. And boom! We are back to ‘size matters’. We can only grow in 1000+ acre farms.
Small acreage automation is a difficult but interesting challenge. That’s why I am interested and also because right now because food crops are mostly Imported and cheap, Agtech doesn’t care. But that will soon change. Sooner than we expect. We should build.
Just liked your FB so I can follow your adventure.
If family farms are gonna use tech to automate and survive as such, the tech will come from smart rural folks. Think more Temple Grandin and less Elon Musk.
This is only a problem for people who own agricultural land, not a problem for operating a farm.
Of course, often farmers both own agricultural land and operate the farm. But the roles are separate in principle, and some people farm on leased land.
Now to substantiate my claim: in the longer run, any change in the amount of profit a typical farm makes, will just drive prices of agricultural land up or down. (For the usual arbitrage reasons.)
The rest of your comment is, of course, still very worthwhile. It just has little to do with being land-rich.
The uncertainty of labour and it’s lack is one more nail on the coffin.
Fun fact: insurance companies and pension funds routinely invest in farmland. This is a risk and speculative game at this point.