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Oh, I forgot a neat one: Drones with thermal imaging to prevent fawns to be killed by tractors.

Anecdote on this: I've been flying R/C planes and drones in some publicly accessible fields with friends for years. Some farmers were a bit confrontational when they saw us (sometimes understandably so, we were always careful but the occasional crash and aircraft retrieval in the middle of a field _did_ happen...). But a few of them were interested, and asked if we could arrange to take some pictures and videos of the fields at specific times, to search for fawns before harvest or similar things. We were happy to oblige, and in return got access to even nicer, non-public areas to gather and fly from regularly. Win-win for all involved.

There's business in routine agricultural overflights for year to year comparison and records, with multispectral cameras (expensive) for ANOVA plots when cross breeding for new crops with resistance, for rock outcrop plotting | individual large rock recording for { later pickup | hazard enty into tractor maps } etc.

A lot of that is done locally here ( large grain fields in Australia ).

I am putting together a computer vision dataset for detection, identification, classification and counting for cattle herds of Indian breeds, which are the strength of Brazilian livestock farming [where there are still a lot of cattle in free-range pastures]. The dataset will also be useful for monitoring illegal livestock farming in protected areas, such as the Amazon. The scarcity of images of these types of cattle on the Internet, where European varieties are prevalent, forces me to negotiate with local farmers to fly my drones in order to obtain the images. It's not an easy job. Most are confrontational and hostile. I move forward with great difficulty but I will not give up. Soon at cownt.com.br.

Edited for clarity.

Fawns, as in female deer? Is hitting them with tractors really a problem?

Fawns as in "deer children". When young, they lie down in fields a lot, and don't have the flight instict developed yet, so if they're in the field with the "parent" deer out getting food and the tractors / harvesters come by, it can be legitimately dangerous.

Their instinct is to stay put, which means they don't run when the tractor comes.

A drone flies over the field, maps where the fawns are staying put, sends a message to automated tractors to reroute.

This is probably the most "feel good" application of drones. That and detecting landmines.

That’s exactly the opposite of what thermal drones are use most of the other time

Besides deer protection and wildlife management in general, they're used in SAR and police - especially in mountainous or forest areas, it's just soooo much faster to send a quick-response team with thermal drones than to travel by foot or wait for a chopper to show up. Obviously in rough weather you still need a legit chopper, but for stuff like "find someone who didn't return from a hike/called for an emergency without knowing where he precisely is" they're just fine.

On the infrastructure side, you can use thermal drones in construction planning to detect if/where a building is losing heat, spot (beginning) defects in industrial installations and inspect if a power line is still working acceptably. DJI also pairs the thermal camera with a decent photo camera so you don't need to send up two drones for the job.

Is it? I believe the commercial application for drones with thermal cameras is fairly well establish at this point. You can spot a lot of things in buildings, transmission lines, etc.

The ops point is that after you spot them you call in old fashioned artillery.

those fawns could be lying on a lot of oil

> don't have the flight instict developed yet

They specifically have the opposite instinct, because fawns usually lack coordination to flee like an adult. So they have the instinct to still.

A you imagine the aftermath of a deer getting ‘harvested’ by the combine?

Can you imagine being I the cabin and witnessing that, how it probably sounds in the process?

Then cleaning up the mess and repairing the damage?

I grew up on a farm in the nineties, and in my teens, I saw a roe deer fawn that went through a forage harvester.

Surprisingly enough, there was almost no blood, but every bone in the animal was broken. The load of silage that it ended up in had to be thrown out, the forage harvester itself, needed some light repairs, the harvest got delayed a few hours, and the whole thing was really depressing.

Luckily as far as I can remember it happened only once, and it was definitely something that we tried hard to avoid.

A female deer is called a doe.

> doe

A deer? A female deer?

> Ray

A drop of golden sun?

> Me

A name I call myself?

> Fa

A long long way to run?

> Sew

A needle pulling thread?

> La A note to follow sol

They hide in the field and are too afraid of running from a track or and farmers can’t see them.

I assume they don't want wild animals that are ridden with diseases to end in something like cattle feed more than unavoidable.

Also, running over a fawn really bums out the person driving the tractor!

I know quite a few people in the industry, and some near the top of big players and the common thing I've heard said is "We have so much data on such a granular level, we don't even know how to exploit most of it".

There are also collars that monitor temperature and gait analysis to identify infection and hoof problems. Cows get automatically segregated at milking time for inspection. A monitor is also available that goes over the tail and monitors when a cow begins calving and alerts the farmer, traditionally farmers would wake up every hour or two to check on cows that were close. Successful farmers have always always on the cutting edge of anything that can increase margins or efficiency, they have to be it's a tough business.

Farming has always been innovative, except where an extreme abundance exists, like flood farming.

> Farming has always been innovative

Shout out to Tractor Wars, which I never expected to enjoy as much as I did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgtHQUi8AvQ

Thanks to modern capitalism, there's no such thing as a (localised) extreme abundance. Extremely fertile land will be bid up, until it's productivity per-dollar-value will be equivalent to other land.

So we will always have incentives for innovation.

(I specifically say 'localised', because on a global level we are living in extreme abundance by historic standards.)

This doesn’t really make sense, Local resources exist in abundance because transportation cost is not zero.

Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do with, north of Canada has abundance of fresh water but it’s uneconomical to move it to California, etc.

I suppose it depends on how you define 'extreme' as a matter of boring tautological semantics. If extreme is defined as 'enough that it is worth extracting to anybody who discovers it'. Sort of like how ore is defined.

Basically there being a limit to abundance before it is too extreme to exist sustainably (without being extracted). You can have Cerro de Potosi, a very silver rich mountain sustainably exist. But a mountain made of solid gold? That would be extracted from until gold devalued itself.

A good way to think about this is to compare the cost of a commodity to shipping costs. Sure, pricey bottled spring water gets shipped all over the world, but bulk agricultural water (measured in acre feet) doesn't. It's heavy for what it's worth, so it's mostly transported downhill in rivers, canals, and so on, with occasional pumps.

There's no global market for water, like there is for oil and liquified natural gas, because the price of water is much lower. Instead there are regional water projects.

Even for natural gas, there aren't pipelines everywhere, and shipping natural gas (by ship) is more expensive than transporting it through pipelines.

Yes, that's true. There can be localised relative abundances of some inputs. Eg almost all of the world has an abundance of air. But submarines and space stations do not.

I guess I can rescue my statement that we don't have localised abundances of (easily) tradeable goods. And that leads to no localised abundances of all the inputs required to make a tradeable good.

To come back to the original example: flood farming would produce an abundance of agricultural outputs, and those are fairly easy to trade. Both across space and these days also across time, thanks to preservation techniques.

(Not all agricultural outputs are easy to transport or preserve, but there's probably something you can grow that is.)

I hope that in the future almost everywhere in the world will still have way too much air so that it's too cheap to measure; but thanks to global trade food prices will always be relatively flat across the globe.

So even people farming insanely productive regions will have plenty of incentives to innovate to further improve productivity.

Yes, we can see that in the American West where most water is used by agriculture. Exporting food can be seen as a more practical alternative to exporting water. When there's a drought, maybe don't export quite so much?

Water rights are complicated, so water is far from freely-traded commodity, but over time, cities do pay more, and that means they tend to get their way. There's a saying that water flows uphill towards money.

Local abundance is traditional: fruit and vegetables in season. It's still true for people with big gardens, when it's not worth their while to sell it.

> Local abundance is traditional: fruit and vegetables in season. It's still true for people with big gardens, when it's not worth their while to sell it.

Yes, that was basically my point: participating in modern economies tends to smooth out local abundance. [0]

That's good overall! Less waste, more innovation. But, of course, there are certain specific things lost to be nostalgic about.

You are also right that water as an input is subject to lots and lots of distortions. And that leads to wasting of water, especially expensive in places where water is actually scarce.

> Yes, we can see that in the American West where most water is used by agriculture. Exporting food can be seen as a more practical alternative to exporting water. When there's a drought, maybe don't export quite so much?

When water has a proper market clearing price, that's exactly what happens.

[0] Home production in a garden is a good example here, because it's usually not for participating in the wider market economy.

Yes, agreed. To continue, though, I think it's not just nostalgia; people who benefit from local abundance can lose something from more efficiency.

AirBnB is another example. There are benefits to living in a desirable location and they're often free for the residents. If the neighbors are, effectively, selling off those amenities, it benefits them and their customers, but not you. And that's why some communities place restrictions.

I believe the Coase theorem suggests that paying off the neighbors would be somehow efficient, if a deal can be reached. It can be difficult to agree on a price, though.

> AirBnB is another example. There are benefits to living in a desirable location and they're often free for the residents.

To be more precise, they are baked into land values / rent.

> I believe the Coase theorem suggests that paying off the neighbors would be somehow efficient, if a deal can be reached. It can be difficult to agree on a price, though.

Yes, transaction costs always kill you.

    > Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do with

Build more aluminum smelters and data centers!

Yes. (And they are already doing that.) You can also build a high voltage direct current undersea cable to some other bigger grid.

Biogas plants still need quite a bit of harvested biomass added tp the manure. Manure by itself has too low a Carbon/Nitrogen ratio, and without supplementation, it will over-produce Ammonia, inihibiting the anaerobic bacteria that digest the feedstock. So you have to add sileage or switchgrass.

Is there anything happening with self-driving tractors? I'd expect that in the absence of speed and most of the typical hazards cars on the roads face, when doing pretty rote stuff like spraying, harvesting row crops, or tilling a field we'd be able to automate it pretty easily.

A lot is going on. 15 years ago farmers were putting the dog in the tractor - it worked so long as there were no deer or other things in the field. Safety is just as hard as for cars though and so progress is just as slow.

I work for john deere. But I don't have non public information and I don't speak for the company.

> - A lot of data is collected for each cow and processed by an external company. This goes down to temperature measurements at each teat in the milking robot. The external company monitors each cow and plans individual treatment to prevent diseases and to optimize milk production.

Very unfortunate for cows that they're able to produce milk for human consumption.

Evolutionary speaking, being tasty and able to produce milk for human consumption has been an extremely successful strategy for cows.

Of course, the individual cow might (or might not!) disagree.

Now imagine how unfortunate it is to be a big, challenging game for human hunt...

Compared to aurochs, the cows are thriving.

(On a side note, I just saw a mounted skeleton of an aurochs yesterday, in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. That beast was huge, and it would look even more overwhelming to medieval or Iron Age people, who were on average shorter than us; I am 6 ft and that animal was as tall as me. That is probably why it was so prestigious to hunt one, I can't even imagine a close combat with that. But it was hunted to extinction.)

> Compared to aurochs, the cows are thriving

This depends on the level of empathy you have for cows.

If you empathise with them as you would with humans, imagine making the same argument to justify slavery

One could argue industrial farms are fate worse than death

This is what I wanted to convey with my original comment. It seems people think having millions of enslaved cows living in horrible conditions is an advantage for cows compared with "less successful species". I imagine the cows see it very differently.

If cows would be useless to humans, their population would be probably in hundreds/thousands globally, or we would let their whole sub-species just die.

Milking is the least bad thing we do to them, I would recommend focusing more on other parts of farming/ranching if you care.

> If cows would be useless to humans, their population would be probably in hundreds/thousands globally, or we would let their whole sub-species just die.

I think the cows would prefer that.