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Comment by shalmanese | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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