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TheCapn

This sounds like fun!

Controls Engineering - Specifically Agricultural: Grain handling, cleaning, processing.

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You're contributing to the monoculture of our planet by designing systems that make only certain grains profitable.

(I don't actually think this but it was a reasonable ethical dilemma I thought)

Almost half of US farm labourers are illegal immigrants;

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor

https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/63465/LegalStatus201...

Pretty crazy how they're treated considering that.

Cool job tho, thanks for feeding people!

Arguably someone working on automating farming systems would be reducing demand for labor in that work.

So really, "isn't this putting impoverished people out of the only job they can get?"

Sure, you're putting small and medium sized farmers out of their homes / farms and contributing to mega-farms. Anyone who can't afford your product will not be able to compete and lose their homes / farms. The way that works is the more efficient farming is, the more land required to live off of. Land is the expensive part. It used to be 40 acres and a mule could get you and your family by, now it's probably 500 acres just to make a decent living due to efficiency in automation. 500 acres of good farmland costs in the millions. It's not like quality food is getting cheaper either, that profit goes into the pockets of the automaters and the mega farmers and middle men mostly. All he food everyone else eats is loaded with fake sugar (high fructose corn syrup) to make it addictive, but its nutritionally garbage. People sure buy it though, because it's addictive.

Also, there's a lot of suicide as a result of that farming efficiency with small / medium farmers. When they can't run their farms effectively because they can't afford the automation or acreage it requires, they off themselves out of shame, leaving their families to pick up the pieces. Don't feel too bad though, you're just at the end of the line of something that's being going on since the 1920s. It really picked up in the 1980s with computerization though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_the_Uni...

https://www.southbendtribune.com/story/news/2020/03/07/farme...

Doesn't the Agricultural industry have one of the highest mortality rates? Grain handling, everything from gases in an enclosed space to being buried alive by a quicksand like effect.

Do you ask for consent before all this handling and cleaning? You know, consent from the grain.

Ok but seriously, the best I can imagine might be a generic environmental impact concern that could be levelled far and wide. Honestly seems pretty legit. Are there any ethical issues we should know about in the field of agricultural grain handling?

I can't really think of anything directly immoral about the business I participate in. Anything that could be pointed as an ethical grey area is more like a side-effect of the capitalist society we exist within.

So maybe more specifically, I'm not working with the farmers directly. I'm working with the businesses buying and selling the grain. The "capitalism grey areas" fall into effect when a farmer signs a contract saying they're going to deliver "Wheat" at a "Grade 2" spec and show up to the elevator with a truck full of wheat. It goes through the grading specs and even though that farmer brought them a "Grade 1" they're only getting paid at a Grade 2 rate.

So the grain elevator itself grabs that top quality stuff, shoves it in a silo with the other top quality stuff and sends the farmer away. They sell that grain at a Grade 1 and make immense profit that is never realized by the farmer who did the work.

It gets fishier the further into it you go. Because a "Grade 1" spec implies certain qualities in the grain: protein, moisture, dockage, etc. etc etc. So if the elevator needs to sell a Grade 2 product, the grading is taken as a sample and likely averaged over the entire load. They can take 10% of that Grade 1 stuff, shove it into a bunch of Grade 3 stuff and sell it as a Grade 2... the blending is where they make their money.

Then it gets even worse, because a grain terminal filling a vessel for export would sign off on a load that contains up to 1% dockage, but after the product in the silos is cleaned its likely to have <0.1% dockage or whatever anyway. So what is the terminal going to do? Surely they don't give the customer free "good" product right? Nope, they fill that vessel 99.5% full of product, then shove worthless garbage in to hit the 0.5% remainder and ship it out. So a vessel with 20,000MT of Soybean likely contains a bunch of garbage wheat or chaff or whatever else they have on hand that can't be sold.

It gets absurd to think they take in those Soybeans, then run them through the clean systems to remove the garbage, but then when it comes time to fill the vessel, they just put all the garbage back in so the customer has to clean it again.

Thanks for such a thoughtful, detailed, and interesting answer.

Do your control systems enable producers of GMO grain to handle and clean their grain with greater efficiency? Then you’re contributing to the GMO problem :)

(I have nothing against GMO personally)

Agricultural automation is part of why Uyghur slavery is so profitable (similar to how the cotton gin led to a revitalization of slavery in the US- with a modicum of training, a single slaves productivity was drastically increased)

Closer to home, assuming you're in the US, the glut of cheap corn syrup plays a big role in our obesity epidemic (especially in underprivileged communities). Obesity and related issues are some of the top killers in the US.

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