This sounds like a much more efficient way to practice monocropping, enhance fragility, and capture economic value by increasing dependence on non-local food sources.
In other news: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/pacific-northwest-s-...
In other news: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/pacific-northwest-s-...
Despite growth in organics, 99% of farmland in the U.S. is still conventional. Anything that reduces chemical herbicide usage on that farmland is a good thing.
Example is the dandelion. Besides having culinary and medicinal value, it acts as a pioneer species for depleted soil. Killing it with more roundup or zapping it with a laser, and then contaminating the land with more fertilizer will just encourage more dandelion growth. The land and ecosystem is signaling a fertility issue, and our present practices work against it.
I say this even though the common mallow is the bane of my existence here in the lower Sanoren ;-)
It seems like you are making an implied argument. Not stating your argument ensures it can't attacked. Not wanting your argument attacked suggests it is weak and won't stand up to scrutiny.
This time, I was adding a subtle sarcasm, which I knew a small minority of HN readers will pick up. They are already familiar with food forests, restoration agriculture, and some may even be familiar with regenerative paradigms.
But let me see if I can condense this into something explicit:
Rather than eliminating everything but the monocrop, there are alternative forms of agriculture that takes advantage of the synergies that come from companion planting, “guilds”. Specific combination of plants planted together can be put together to reduce ecological invasions, or create an ecosystem that can produce harvestable food items for most of the year. Some combinations can mutually resist pests and diseases. Others can be combined to take advantage of vertical spaces (canopy layers), or to effectively modify the local hardiness and heat zones, or modify wind conditions.
Designing such a thing can get very complex. Some designs, however, become so resilient, they continue producing human-harvestable food despite being abandoned for over 150 years.
The Pacific Northwest is not the only region where indigenous people have used these practices. There is quite a bit of anthropological evidence that this is a wide spread practice ... what is novel with that article is that ecologists are acknowledging that this had happened in the Pacific NW.
An alternative use of ML, CV, and robotics, might be something that can observe and identify all the participants in an ecosystem, such as food forest, and use ML to sketch out the possibility space in which viable cross species synergies can enhance an ecosystem. This could be used as an aid in designing a food forest.
One use of ML, accelerates ecological degeneration. A different use of ML accelerates ecological regeneration. I don’t think the latter involves a weed killing robot.
No one is suggesting this be done. Fanatical monocropists don't exist.
Your argument is based on a false dichotomy. We can make monocrop farming more efficient and environmentally friendly (eliminate pesticides) while also exploring other systems.
More efficient and environmentally friendly are contradictory in terms of monocrop
> Fanatical monocropists don't exist.
Uh what? What about the almost 100 million acres of corn in the US?
By “monocropping”, I am talking about planting a single cash crop on a plot of land. A farm may operate multiple crops, each on its own field. They might rotate crops with cover. Some might even interplant crops in rows, or even between plants (as cover). Each field is intended to grow and harvest a single cash crop. You don’t even want to different varieties of the same species close together because you want to ensure a consistent produce. Many restaurants demand consistency (easier to consistently produce dishes when ingredients are of consistent size and quality), and consumers have been conditioned to take a few varieties as representative. (Example: many consumers think of Roma tomatoes when they think of “tomato”).
The combines are designed to till, sow, and harvest in generally linear rows, for a single type of crop. The field is plowed in a way to be level, so that watering can be as uniform as possible. Soil amendments, such as fertilizer, is relatively simple to apply.
So as an example, an old Native American practice called the Three Sisters: corn, squash, and beans, can be planted together. These three crops, when planted together, includes a plant that will fix nitrogen (beans), as well as a ground cover (squash) that help retain moisture. The corn stalk functions as a trellise for the beans, and help shade it. Beans can be harvested early in the season, corn and squash later in the season, with squashes working well as a dense store of nutritional energy that will last through the winter. It also happens that there are lots of culinary dishes that also combines these three plants.
I know of no industrial farming practices or equipment that practices the Three Sister. Driving a harvesting tractor through there will destroy the squash, and probably the beans too.
There are other combinations such as, tomatoes and basil; strawberries and asparagus.
When I use companion planting in my garden, I noticed a few things. First, harvesting is more difficult. You have to be able to identify each plant. I had to look through the different canopy layers to see what is going on. But it was also my first attempt, and I think I can design it a lot better.
When done this way, yield are not as good for any single crop (if they don’t synergize on nitrogen fixing). But I also wonder if the total crop output across all harvestable plants are better.
That is just for annual crops. There is a similar practice that can done for perennial crops. This is what those “food gardens” mentioned in that article, though they are usually called “food forests” by enthusists.
One of the things about this method of farming is that it is intended to decentralize food production, letting the bulk of the food production be local, in order to reduce transportation. You can then grow varieties that taste better and are more nutritionally dense, instead of being bred for staying edible and transported by refrigeration. (I am looking at you, roma tomatoes and hothouse tomatoes).
During the years of international sanction, Cuba had to develop self-sufficiency with use of very little fertilizer (no oil imports), no gasoline driven farm equipment (no oil), and as little motorized transportation as possible. They used a variety of methods, some drawn from modern science and some drawn from older farming practices; but whatever it was, they could not simply use pesticides, fertilizers, or refrigeration.
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/cubas-urban-farm...
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
Is that what you mean or did you mean something else, like the machine could eliminate some non-monocrop plants but not others?
Rather than doing that, we can use companion planting, integrated pest management (chickens, ducks, etc) on smaller fields.
Smaller fields and multi-crops don’t have the same scale as the current farming operations. But the idea here isn’t to replace a large commercial monocropping farm with another large commercial polycropping farm. Instead, we are replacing large monocropping farms with many smaller farms using these methods, and locating them to population centers.
As far as the point you brought up about society eliminating non-monocropping methods ... I don’t think there is a need to have our society use laws to force monocroppers out of business. Instead, I think it is better as a grassroot effort with people practicing this, as a sort of ecological succession —- people starting up home gardens and neighorhood farms to supplement existing food supplies, with monocropping dying on its own.
It does not even have to happen in affluent places first. There are many urban food deserts where people can only get expensive, nutritionally-poor food from convenience stores. You get some small operations there, even hybrid methods, with community involvement and it can change a neighborhood. (Examples: Urban Farming Guys out in Kansas City, and Brad Lancaster out in Tuscon, AZ)
There are plenty of commercial farmers who want to get out of the debt trap they got into with cash cropping. Some even tried their hand at organic farming ... but some will bring their big farm monocropping mindset into it and fail. I think many farmers (and not the agricorps) love working the land and feeding their society. The ones that don’t have been leaving farming for easier work.
But I do think there are things our society does to keep agricorps going. If food decentralization reaches a certain point, I think those agricorps will fight back to retain control of their markets.
Go start your own thing instead of lazily smashing others.
So what is a more worthwhile use of high tech? Being someone in tech and having greatly economically benefited from it, I've recently been reframing what I know about software tech, startups, innovation with a regenerative paradigm. I am still making my way through Carol Sanford's work on regenerative paradigms and figuring out a lot of this stuff out. So far:
(1)
Christopher Alexander had introduced the idea of creating pattern languages for people living, working, and playing within building architecture so that they can modify and design their own living spaces. What we ended up with are cookie-cutter housing in suburbia. His work greatly influenced OOP and Human-Computer-Interface design (see his 1996 OOPSLA Keynote) ... and what we ended up with is the Gang of Four, Apple products, growth hacks, and "user engagement".
What we don't have are individuals, families, and communities having computer tech that can customized by the users for what works in their local environment. Smalltalk was designed with that intent in mind, but our legacy from Smalltalk is the Gang of Four and OOP "design patterns".
(2)
There was a recent article posted here. It was a fictional interview, the premise being someone from a parallel world where software design was elevated on par with science and art, and not merely engineering. They start with a "design brief" rather than engineering requirements. I lost track of that article.
Just some evolving thoughts.
I have this struggle often. Before software engineering, I was working on permaculture farms and apprenticed as a natural builder (cob mostly).
I still have no idea how to make a living from this though.