My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need.
Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
It makes more sense in a laboratory environment but this just seems like overkill for a regular person.
If you factor in wastage and the expensive supply chain logistics for things that spoil quickly it's probably cheaper to grow them closer to the point of use, especially if you can keep down labor costs with automation.
Tastier and more nutritious too.
I don’t know what you mean here. By 2020 I assume you mean the covid-19 pandemic? I agree that the pandemic itself put people at risk. But what do you mean by “cascading failures that put individuals at risk”?
From my perspective society and systems of it kept on going despite the large scale upheavals happening. If for anything I would cite 2020 as evidence that things are not as fragile as we suspected. But maybe you have a different perspective?
But there are also a whole lot of benefits to producing food yourself: resilience, diversity of food crops, taste.
Also, people often enjoy the process, which effectively lowers the economic cost of doing it yourself.
These robots will not help avoid famine, but they will help rich first world people be more cognizant of food and agriculture. Which in turn will help them make better choices with the food they buy. This can only work against calory-dense inudstrial food, which arguably is the larger problem than efficiency in large parts of the world.
A combination of clean energy transportation/more local growing would help.
That said, I think making room for something like:
is perhaps a bit more marketable (though they missed out by not sizing it to fit next to a refrigerator).
We only uphold property rights because enough of us see a benefit in doing so. If that changes, so can we.
We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour.
Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour. Sorry.
The thing about growing food locally, is that you don't need individually package your apples in plastic. You just harvest it, then eat it, in it's healthiest possible form, while also not doing insane polluting.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Your comment would be fine without the first (and I would also say the last) sentence.
I’m not a farmer but I live in a farming city, and one thing I notice is that the crops around here are definitely not all harvested at the same time. Some are harvested months before others. Even the same crops like corn or various beans are harvested weeks apart. For corn sometimes months. Farms also share a lot of equipment. Though a lot of farms are just absolutely massive corporate farms so it’s not really “sharing” but has the same effect.