Good. If you speak to anyone in the agriculture industry they will tell you the small and family farms tend to have the worst safety, environmental and animal cruelty records.
I grew up around family farms. Many members of my family still produce crops and own livestock. So, to someone with first hand knowledge your comment rings false. The large feedlots, processing plants, etc. are the most inhumane (and dehumanizing), places I know of in the industry.
I would appreciate if you would at least _attempt_ to provide proof/justification before making such a blanket, mean-spirited statement.
But it’s expensive. The failure of small farms is mostly seen in the balance sheet.
Having said that, it is because of economics. Small farm environmental sustainability is not feasible due to $$. The solution for this small acreage automation(what I am working on) systems and protocols.
Small acreage automation is important because globally, food comes from small acreages and it is becoming increasingly difficult for many small and poorer nations to feed their people. Not all countries have rich people owning very large acreages in cultivation.
American farms also produce little food and more fodder/fiber/fuel. We import most of our nutritious food like produce.
For food security, there needs to be more small acreage automation and more small farmers. We educate everyone these days and they need to be employed. They are not going to manually pick weeds if they run a sustainable farm. The only reason California has $45+ billion in ag revenue is because of the poorly paid undocumented immigrant labour force. And massive entitlements that big farmers(most of them as corporates own between 20k-100k acres of land) earn mostly through our complicated water agreements that the tax payers bear most of the cost indirectly.
Could you elaborate on this? What exactly is it that you want to automate?
I am unable to elaborate at this point, but I think this will give you an idea about the kind of costs and returns we face in our industry: https://coststudyfiles.ucdavis.edu/uploads/cs_public/7a/c9/7...
Any thoughts or insights would be appreciated and helpful to me.
It isn't nearly so clear cut a situation.