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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Wind turbines can be built big enough that the blades, at the lowest point, are higher than almost all other land uses, except perhaps forestry.

To be honest, the access roads are probably the biggest real impediment to using the land around a wind turbine. Can't exactly farm millions of acres of corn with robotic combine harvesters with a criss-cross of access roads to the base of every turbine.

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And yet. https://www.google.com/maps/@43.0700265,-95.6508704,3a,60y,9...

That's a turbine in the middle of active farmfield, off a dirt road, servicing a town a bit under a mile away that is barely 10 city blocks wide at its widest point. In the middle of Iowa.

My point just because you can build the turbines to clear everything, there are areas in this nation where there's just no point to doing that; and it's more economical to just make them shorter and put the money towards something more useful

OK, I think I agree but I was responding to london. The idea that wind turbines and large-scale corn cultivation are incompatible is contrary to an abundance of counterexamples.

You want your wind turbines as high as possible anyways. Higher up there are stronger and more consistent winds.

Beautiful image: thanks.

I'm not sure robotic combine harvesters are a real concern (yet ?) - modern "manned" harvesters are already crazy effective and fast & I've seen them navigate some pretty crazy field geometries at times, so I'm sure they can handle a straight road.

> Can't exactly farm millions of acres of corn with robotic combine harvesters with a criss-cross of access roads to the base of every turbine.

You certainly can; single-objective suboptimality is not the same as impossibility. But perhaps this would be an excellent use-case for heavy-lift dirigibles.

Why not? Seems easy to teach the robots to not harvest on the road

Odd shapes and constantly starting/stopping the plougher/seeder/harvester mean you get less ROI on your equipment. Farming is super tight margins - if your machines waste 20% of the time starting and stopping every time they pass over a road, your farms profits are wiped out.

This is true whether the machines are robot driven or not, and it's the reason most commercial farms have huuuuuge fields rather than lots of small ones.

Why would the access roads create a complex shape? Fields already have access roads. Either the farm is flat and the turbine access roads can be on a minimally invasive grid or the turbines are on a hill and the fields are already a complex shape.

The cost of the land to the grower is lower on account of the presence of the turbines.

I have trouble imagining that the cost of interrupting your seeder or lifting your plough every quarter mile is really higher than the profit generated by the wind turbines.

Midwestern farmers very much disagree with that “impossibility”

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