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Comment by peteradio | Hacker News Reader

That is gardening not farming.

You always have to prove things out on a small scale for it to work on a large scale. When I was in my early teen we had a summer program to plant vegetables. I do understand that it's not the same as large scale farming having grown up around farming but fundamentals are still similar.

Yeah having stationary structures doesn't make sense in large scale farming but AUV with the tech that is in Farmbots makes a whole lot of sense.

But I might be missing something. Also the farming I have experience is just in Iceland where things don't get that big. I've been around a lot of different tangential things to do with farming since my father side went from farming to construction. But I feel like a lot of the things are similar.

But what I know most about is software and I am mostly judging things based on that and I'm really impressed with Farmbot and the choices they made.

I think that there's some degree of "you can't get to the moon by climbing taller trees" happening here. There are methods that can be promising for gardens, and even smaller-scale farms (less than triple-digit acres, say) that don't feasibly scale up to what amounts to continental-scale farming like you see in much of North America. It doesn't mean that those approaches don't have value, just that at some point the scale of the problem space changes things pretty fundamentally.

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