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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

Farm machinery got "big" because it enables one human to be more productive, cover more area in one unit of time. Human time is one of the most expensive resources in farming.

As we automate more farming, and move to self operated machinery, we can shrink those machines down again. We can design fleets of machines to work in tandem, and operate around other structures, such as solar. The age of the tram lines is going to come to an end.

This also provides opportunities for replacing chemicals with small robots, such as for weeding.

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> Human time is one of the most expensive resources in farming.

Not any more. A combine costs around a million bucks and has a total useful lifespan of about 10,000 hours which is $100 an hour (not counting maintenance and fuel costs which approx doubles this rate) which far exceeds the cost of a human operator. Capital costs exceed labor costs for almost all types of farming these days.

You might check your math here buddy. Sure a combine (which is called that because it does three jobs all at once, reaping, threshing and winnowing) may cost 100$/hr over it's useful lifespan, but it replaces much more than one person (more like 150-300 people), especially when you consider that harvesting is extremely time-sensitive, sometimes in a matter of hours...

Edit: after some research and calculations, my estimate is that a single modern combined harvester can replace between 350 and 700 men.

But it doesn’t matter how many people it replaces. TODAY it’s a capital heavy business.

Side note: textbooks like to talk about the "amazing" productivity growth in manufacturing, but that's only been something like 6 to 20 times, not 350 - 700 times.

The real story of productivity growth is in agriculture, and it's still going on, with autonomous vehicles and robotics. An amazing world we live in, where the process of growing food was capable of such incredible labor efficiency gains. Imagine if medicine was the same way...

Sorry if I seemed to imply a productivity gain of 350-700 times. This is a very rough estimate for only the tasks accomplished by a combined harvester, which happens in a very narrow timeline in the season. I was certainly not talking about the overall productivity of the farms.

Or maybe use illegal cheap labour from another country. Something like feudalism, but more modern!

You joke, but there are a lot of crops that can't easily be machine picked, and probably never will be. Although I'm a proponent for legal safe immigration for sessional work with a route to permanent residency. The lack of legal routes results in unsafe working conditions and modern slavery.

Why would I joke? People are cheaper than machines.

Edit: "illegal" in terms of work law, minimal salary and safety standards. Legally imported workers are probably even cheaper and easier to exploit!

Until we establish socialism, human labour will always be exploited and cheaper than machines!

My mistake, I usually assume someone openly proposing illegal immigration, rather than safe legal immigration, as a solution is joking.

Ah but now supplemented with a push to legalize child labor in the US.

Child labour is already legal (to some extent) in agriculture, unfortunately.

And even more often overlooked by those benefiting from it.

I don't know about never. Strawberry picking robots seem to be in the piloting phase (out of the lab, not yet in mass production). Same with harvesting salad greens, and grape picking. Other fruits and vegetables look like just a matter of time and investment.

As we move down the robotics learning curve, prices will fall to the point where investment for designing blackberry pickers or cherry pickers (for example) is affordable.

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