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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

Erm, the "precision farming" use HUGE fields of monoculture crops and pesticides.

Can't see much precision there.

With precision you could do small fields with trees and bushes (with fruits) in between and need no pesticides ... all in all, a farm could then be also a nice place just to walk around and enjoy nature. Like some bio-farms are allready today, the problem is just, that the human labour needed to do it is huge - with robots it might be possible to go all bio - and still feed everyone!

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Yes, but production and throughput capacity, along with logistics of moving crops from the farm to a storage elevator are things that still need to be considered. Today's most advanced combines can harvest 10,000 bushels of corn per hour...you would need hundreds of robots in a field to even come close to that level of efficiency. One combine also needs about five semi-trailers driving around the clock to get all of the grain out of the field and into a storage elevator without slowing down the whole operation. Letting harvesting robots unload themselves into a truck one at a time would take weeks. There are some big changes that would need to take place to achieve what you are talking about.

> There are some big changes that would need to take place to achieve what you are talking about.

No doubt about that. And I am not so naive to believe they will happen soon on a big scale ... but I hope to live long enough to see them come (while having my part in it)

Most of the grain and corn is used to feed livestock. So if you just turned those corn/grain fields into grazing land you wouldn't need the combine(as cool as it is.)

Are you're sure you'd get the same energy per land output with grass as with corn?

I think a big reason for using corn are the very generous corn growing subsidies. I'm not sure it's more efficient technically.

No, corn and beans are far more energy dense than grasses. You need way more grazing land than you do crop land to create the same amount of beef.

Just use a thousand quadcopter drones, each one capable of harvesting a single ear of corn at a time and dropping it off on the elevator. It'd operate like a swarm of giant bees! :)

And this is somehow better/cheaper/more efficient than a single large tractor?

think decentralized. you don't need to produce that amount of corn in one area. if you have 10k households, you could produce the same level of food without the same environmental impact and less costs (subsidies aren't free) while having better food quality and diversity.

It's precision because each part of the field is uniquely targeted with just exactly what it needs. This greatly mitigates over fertilization, and all the other agricultural runoff, which is not only more economical, but also more ecologically friendly.

Microfarms are unsustainable. They don't grow nearly enough food, nor the variety of foods needed (we can't live on just kale), nor do they do this economically. Basically they're cute ideas from suburbanites that have no experience beyond growing anything beyond a chia pet herb garden in a window sill. Large fields exist of a reason. And yes, GMOs and "Big Ag" is wildly successful and safe for the same reasons.

Robots don't need to solve the planting or watering problem. That's already a solved problem. The most labor intensive task is in vegetable and fruit harvesting. A two-axis vertical plotter doesn't even begin to solve that problem. It's a vision and dexterity problem. Once you solve that problem, there's no reason not to truck-mount the arms and simply scale up.

The fly-over states know a thing or two about this.

But it is a unsolved problem to produce enough food, without contaminating the soil and water.

So I don't see much precision with the use of pesticides on large scale and never heard of a way to prevent them from going into the groundwater. (oh and I know a little bit about the ways how it gets decided, what chemicals get labeled as "harmless")

Oh and explain this:

> Microfarms are unsustainable. They don't grow nearly enough food

Why should lots of microfarms produce less food, than one "macrofarm" of the same size?

Doing those things on a big scale only reduces required labour -> that's why I want robots.

But it is true, that bio, if you meant that, can't produce as much per field, as a monoculture field, no matter the size - but with a monoculture, poisened field, you only get food and destroyed everything else - with a bio field, you get food and intact nature with diversity, clean water and soil ... all in all a place where you want to be. So all in all you get much more from the land if you grow Bio.

> Why should lots of microfarms produce less food, than one "macrofarm" of the same size?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

But the amount of sun shining on the same size of land is exactly the same - no matter how small you splitt it up.

The macrofarm will be able to afford innovations before each microfarm will. Suppose a tool is developed that harvests vegetables better than existing methods. Let's say it's less likely to crush the vegetable it's picking. It's new technology so it's expensive, but if you're operating at a large enough scale, it might be worth the cost.

In this case, each microfarm will produce less vegetables than a macrofarm of the same size.

I wasn't trying to be a jerk by linking to the Wikipedia article. It seemed to me like you weren't familiar with the concept.

> It seemed to me like you weren't familiar with the concept And you seem to me, like you were not familiar with the topic being discussed: output of the same amount of land, no matter the required work (because of robots)

So, nevermind ;)

The problem isn't the potential output of the land; it's that the costs go up rapidly. With a very large field a traditional tractor/plow/disk/seeder/cultivator can do a lot of work in a short amount of time. If the field is now 1/100 the size, the "tractor" (robot, etc.) and its implements don't cost 1/100 as much. They may only cost 1/5 as much, so your costs are now 20x what they would otherwise have been for the proportional output.

I think that's the point he was trying to make.

My grandparents used to harvest most of their food from the farm around their house.

Most people in that village did the same. And they survived and the food was very good - it had flavor and taste, attributes which are not applicable to produce grown in the large scale farms of today.

The only problem is that they had to work every day all day on those farms..

Large scale industrial farming made it possible for people to move to cities and forget about the difficult task of working the land.

And it was good. For a while.. But now we are faced with different problems - over populated cities, pollution, excessive carbon in the atmosphere, water shortages, etc.

Robotic farmers allow us to dream of a world in which people can grow their food locally without having to do the manual labor or rely on large-scale farming. Many could move back to the countryside - closer to nature and type away on reddit just like before, while the robots take care of their food outside in the small field.

> Robotic farmers allow us to dream of a world in which people can grow their food locally without having to do the manual labor or rely on large-scale farming. Many could move back to the countryside - closer to nature and type away on reddit just like before, while the robots take care of their food outside in the small field.

This will never happen in the form you describe. It would mean no bananas and coffee for most of the planet. It would mean no fresh vegetables in the winter. Most fruit would be highly seasonal.

There are only 2 ways of achieving this: global food sourcing, or complete climate control - which would need to be much more sophisticated than the "vertical farms" you see nowadays if you wanted to grow e.g. orange trees or banana palms.

>My grandparents used to harvest most of their food from the farm around their house.

I do that. To a much greater extreme than most people: all of our dairy, meat, eggs, vegetables and most fruit comes from our yard.

>The only problem is that they had to work every day all day on those farms.

I spend about two hours a week doing it. Clearly you do not have to work all day every day to grow your own food.

>Robotic farmers allow us to dream of a world in which people can grow their food locally without having to do the manual labor or rely on large-scale farming.

So did permaculture. This is already a solved problem. The reason it is not done is cultural, not technical.

You could also open up a lot of new farm land in rocky and mountainous areas.

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