Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

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> You hinted at it but seem to brush off the external cost as a small thing to be improved.

I understand you reading that way but it's not what I meant or at all what I think. The work I do (environmental monitoring and data display/analysis) is used heavily to reduce environmental externalities (I spent much of the past four years working on a project seeking to eradicate pesticide spray drift events) and to minimise resource utilisation (particularly irrigation water); the experience has taught me that these are major, difficult-to-solve problems, but they can be solved by people who are willing to do the work over many years to bring about the requisite changes both in technology and practices. Of course I know outsiders can sometimes bring about important changes that insiders didn't consider (indeed I've tried to be that kind of person in this and other industries, with some success at times); but it still needs thorough work over a long time to get major breakthroughs (as it did for SpaceX rockets), whereas these startups never seem to stick around for long.

> Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity

I'm not convinced this is true, now we can see that the global population is flattening and likely to start declining in the foreseeable future. It's not a particularly strongly held opinion or one I need to argue about, but it just seems to me that the amount of land used for agriculture now is no great problem.

On reducing land area: as an agroecologist, I do think that this is a very important goal.

First, because in many modern agricultural landscapes (such as intensive farming regions in western Europe or the US Midwest), there is simply no space for nature. Agriculture is the leading cause of biodiversity loss in large parts of the world, and much of it has to do with lack of natural habitats.

And secondly, because we have such a lot of pressure on land in the more densely populated regions of the world - now only exacerbated by area demands for renewable energies.

However, I agree that vertical farming is unlikely to be a workable solution. Much more promising (though also more boring and irritating to some people) is to (a) reduce food waste and (b) reduce meat consumption. We could easily triple our food output without any further technical advances if we "just" did those two things.

Can you say more about the pesticide drift work you did?

I can see that being valuable for a number of reasons - mainly just reducing the amount of human exposure to pesticides.

Sure. It's a project initiated by a group of local farmers and researchers (meteorologists and an enviro engineer) in the state of South Australia, and funded by state government grants, to install high-precision weather stations throughout all the agricultural regions of that state.

Data is updated every 10 minutes, and it reports specific readings/calculations indicating whether it is safe to spray pesticides [1]. More recently (since I left the project) they've added in predictive calculations derived from ML models, that can indicate whether it's likely to become risky or stop being risky for spraying in the next two hours.

It also reports conventional meteorological measurements (temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind etc) and relevant calculated values relating to fire risk, seasonal thermal accumulations (growing degree days), evapotranspiration etc - so it is a general-purpose weather/environmental data service for growers.

It seems to be very powerful and useful, however it still relies on growers remembering to look at the app and make the right decision each time they're thinking of spraying, and a combination of education, social pressure and law enforcement is needed to encourage responsible conduct.

The biggest issue they're trying to mitigate is damage to other crops [2] but pesticide residue in food/beverage products is another significant factor, as it can affect other producers' organic/biodynamic certification status, and some countries require imported food/bev products to pass very stringent maximum levels of pesticide residue.

You can search for "south australia mesonet" for more details.

[1] The most significant factor for this is the presence of thermal inversions, and this requires temperatures to be measured at ground level and 10m up, hence the need for quite elaborate/costly public infrastructure rather than relying on growers having their own weather stations.

[2] I started typing "nearby crops", but one of the major issues is that the combination of thermal inversions and winds can mean that residues can be carried long distances - 40km+ before being deposited onto other crops when the inversion reverses, which means it's hard/impossible to identify where the residue came from, meaning ex-post liability attribution for statutory or civil penalties can be impossible.

That’s very cool. Thanks for sharing those details.

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