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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

The best way to avoid weeds...

Hydroponics inside of greenhouses farmed by robots.

Ultimately that's just costly, but the shortest path to reducing that cost is more affordable energy.

Until we get to sealed greenhouses maybe exotic solutions like poison resistant Genetically Modified (Organisms?) should be avoided as food and industrial sources.

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I'd rebuff your hydroponics idea, and add that it's worth considering aquaponics. You drastically reduce the amount of growth and nutrient additives, as the system becomes effectively a closed-loop with fish (and aerobic bacteria in the growing medium) creating the nutrients required.

Setup costs are generally large, but aquaponics scale very well.

So, if such a system is feasible and profitable (at scale), where are the farms that are killing off 'traditional' farms left and right?

I'll tell you where all the aquaponics farms are: in bankruptcy court, because very few of them have managed to figure out how to make this system work at a scale bigger than home production, and even less how to do so while still being economically competitive. It's not a coincidence that most tilapia production is not in aquaponics farms. And it's not like it hasn't been tried; people try to do so every day and have been doing so for 30. But saying "but aquaponics scale very well." just screams 'I read some blog posts about this so now I know they scale well', because the technology simply isn't there.

I've been running aquaponics on a hobby farm scale for more than a few years now, but thanks.

Also, it's unlikely anyone will ever still see this, but coincidentally this research paper came out a few days ago about this exact issue: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144860917... .

OK my post probably could have done without the last sentence, but my point stands: aquaponics doesn't scale with current technology. Numerous attempts have shown and are still showing it.

And they don't have that fucking oily taste that hydroponically grown stuff does.

Plus you get to eat lots of tilapia.

We ran Rainbow Trout, Silver Perch and Barramundi :)

My dad was telling me recently about drones which can fly down the rows and apply insecticides directly to the affected part of the plants rather than spraying the entire fields. I don't know if this technology is already in use, but it will be coming

Robot weed-pullers might be OK at some point.

Any chemical approach is just going to select for resistance sooner or later (often sooner than expected).

This seems relevant:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rorymackean/tertill-the...

Just saw this the other day. Not exactly for commercial farms I don't think, but not far off either.

Inter-row hoeing is enough to get good yield for crops that have good row spacing.

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