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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Farming is already incredibly efficient. Anyone who wants it to be even more efficient is just a huge company wanting to rid their supply chain of humans entirely.

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Farming some things is efficient: wheat, soy, corn, etc. Most vegetables and fruit are still very, very labor intensive especially organic farms where you need a ton of labor just to deal with weeds.

Vegetable and fruit are below 1% of the agricultural production by mass. The major parts are cereals, oil grains and tubers.

Status quo modern farming is reliant on extremely large input of fossil fuels, there is plenty of scope for improvement in this regard.

At the moment modern agriculture is effectively making food out of oil.

Electric tractors/harvesters powered by solar on fallow fields?

You skipped right past petroleum fertilizer.

The investment would be quite steep for a farmer that has already taken large loans in order to fund tractors. Many farmers simply don't have the margins. Some still drive around with 40 year-old machinery because buying modern equipment is too expensive.

I don't _like_ the proposed idea of farming as a service, but the fact is that I think it's one of the few ways we have to modernize small-scale farms in the less developed parts of the Western World.

"Anyone who wants it to be even more efficient..."

...is a reasonable person, far as I can tell. Or is there an upper limit on desired efficiency?

touche. But I do believe there are upper limits on desired efficiency in some cases. I'm not a fan of eliminating jobs in all cases. In agriculture I'm not a fan of consolidation and I see the endgame as a few huge companies owning most of the farmland in the US (most of the land) and all those jobs going away. So I guess I'm not against efficiency so much as consolidation of power and ownership. Perhaps one day we'll all have our own robotic gardener, but I doubt it.

The limits of crop production (also) by Prof. Bugbee (don't remember the main author) might be a good starting point for venturing into this question.

There are fertile areas that don’t lend themselves to current technologies because they’re too hilly. So you could perhaps increase efficiency in those places without impacting efficiency in plains areas that are combine heaven.

Growing corn or wheat is indeed super-efficient in its use of human labor. But pretty wasteful in topsoil, chemicals, energy. And other crops (like fruit, or herbs) are much more labor-intensive. So that's two directions where it would be great to get more efficient.

I'm sure they would have said the same thing when the Aquaduct was invented. Anyone who wants to stop companies from becoming more efficient should carefully analyze what they are trying to prevent, and fix that problem more directly.

>> Anyone who wants to stop companies from becoming more efficient should carefully analyze what they are trying to prevent, and fix that problem more directly.

Thanks. I reached the same conclusion in my response to another comment here. More efficient farming is good. What I foresee happening as a result may not be so good. You are right to suggest separating the issues.

Not a reason to make it more so (unless it creates more pollution or other regression)

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