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Comment by James_K | Hacker News Reader

Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.

Same goes for cooking your own food, doing your own laundry and picking your own clothes. Efficiency has its place in times of scarcity, but there is a cultural component on top. Part is education, part is carrying and renewing traditions, part is the ikea effect, sure.

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.

Rich people are the healthiest in society. They eat the most fresh food already. The people eating calorie-dense industrial food are mostly too poor to afford a $4000 robot and a plot of land to put it on, especially when it produces a very small amount of fresh food.

You're very right. And growing food is not cheap either, the initial investment is on the hundreds, even for a small vegetable garden and it takes time for the plants to grow, the yield is very small, counting the loss to pest and critters and it's a daily effort to care for the plants. After all of this, there are people who leaves too far north and the season is too short, or in too dry area, the thing is a nightmare. I love doing my own vegetable garden, but damn, the farms market is much easier.

From what I recall, it depends on your definition of efficiency. Large farms are more efficient in terms of mass of produce per unit of labour but less efficient in terms of mass of produce per unit area.

Absolutely. Biointensive gardening blows conventional ag out of the water on yield per area, it’s just way more labour involved since you’re companion cropping everything.

That explains something I was puzzled about recently. How the Amish can keep buying land for their famously many children, while using less modern technology than their competitors.

But would you get those same efficiency gains with one of these robots? They seem similar to mass farms in how they are laid out, and they also are going to wast some space for the machines to move around. They would need a truly staggering amount of metal and parts compared with a mass farm, and that metal has to come from somewhere which takes up land.

There are obviously economies of scale in agriculture.

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.

For homeowners with a garden it's not necessarily about efficiency. I have a little garden and the food quality is just way better in terms of freshness and taste.

I agree with you overall, but some vegetables were found in a recent study to be more efficiently grown at home. Also, a lot of people already have turfgrass farms and converting those to veggie farms would be a huge net win. Finally, if you think that people have a fairly static amount of time/energy to spend on hobbies, hobby farming would likely be a net benefit because some hobbies have much greater negative externalities.

One large farm needs to optimize for their own needs instead of mine. I want tomatoes that taste good but they barely exist at the store. Large farms want to sell flavourless tomatoes that look nice and last a long time.

Home gardens are cheaper than stores, since seeds are cheaper than finished fruits/veggies. Of course it depends on free labor of The Gardener which this may address.

In some ways yes, in other ways it isn't though. Far less shipping, and some fruits and vegetables are just straight up better and healthier when harvested ripe instead of early so they can be shipped and stored. There is also a lot more wasted food that doesn't sell in a store well because they don't give you a discount for lesser specimens, but that people can and would eat otherwise.

There are already some good points made about efficiency, but I’ll also add that for an individual sometimes it’s not about efficiency but about survivability in the event of a crisis. As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to cascading failures that put individuals at risk, so it’s logical that some would want to mitigate the risk of food production failures.

> As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to cascading failures that put individuals at risk

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?

I suspect they are referring to the whole "we can't even produce face masks" kind of fiascos. Yes we got out of it alright, but in good portion out of pure luck that covid-19 isn't as deadly as ebola...

By the looks of things we did make out of COVID-19 just fine (from a civilization standpoint even if not at the individual level for all individuals) so not sure this supports your point.

“Just fine” is relative I suppose. We were fortunate that COVID-19 was relatively mild compared to what could have happened, but if you recall, there were major supply chain issues and at least in my area there were shortages, outages, and elevated prices on food items. Given what we saw, it seems reasonable to me that some people would want to hedge against something even worse by growing at least some of their food at home.

This is probably not true for a lot of produce with a limited shelf life.

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.

Farmers get their inputs much cheaper than I do, especially water. Water is essentially free compared to residential rates at about 100x cheaper.

I dont think water forms a large % of the cost of fresh veg - certainly not relative to logistics and spoilage.

It is for farming at any kind of volume at home. I spend about $100/month with drip irrigation for vegetables.

But balance that with centralised farms meaning that food needs to be distributed which is currently very bad for the environment. Shipping oranges from Spain is not exactly carbon friendly.

A combination of clean energy transportation/more local growing would help.

People generally want a varied diet and lots of stuff only grows in specific places (or only grows well in specific places). So reducing shipping, maybe, but I wouldn't count on it.

Yes but most people already own a plot of land that is not in use for anything except growing grass.

So what? I don't let efficiency control my life or hobbies.

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