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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Weeds are the enemy /s

But really, the whole idea of having perfectly manicured fields like that with no sign of any weeds around seems like the real problem to me.

Zero biodiversity…we wonder where the insects are going ?

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Having worked a farm for a few summers, my understanding is that we're dealing with the following set of tradeoffs.

1. If you allow weeds, you'll need to till the soil to maintain yields

2. If you till the soil you erode it, damaging the the long term health of your farm and water supplies.

3. If you drop yields globally, people starve (and farmers go out of business)

Since eroding the soil harms biodiversity in a different set of ways, killing weeds seems like the least bad option. Ideally we wouldn't require harsh chemicals to do that but no one has quite figured it out.

I picked up grains from a farm in Dwight, Illinois that makes very limited use of herbicides and pesticides (it seems like oats are all but impossible to grow economically without some use of a weed killing agent). The farmer made the transition for his health and the health of his kids, because he was intuiting that certain health problems were the result of agricultural chemicals. I was struck, walking in their corn field, by the abundance of insects and weeds, and the absence of these quantities in standard ag corn fields struck me as alarming.

There is a very good reason why the remove weeds. It decreases yeilds and increases contamination by a lot

As the video points out (toward the end), since these robots recognize and work on each individual plant, they are much more able to deal with more biodiversity than our current methods, which can only scale for monocrops.

Would be super cool to have an autonomous robot that could get a 'kill list' and destroy every invasive plant in an area while leaving everything else unharmed.

Could be a fantastic diversity-enabling tool.

There's "no sign of any weeds/zero biodiversity" and then there's "target the weeds that would crowd out your crop", which is definitely a problem in my raised beds.

Maybe it's monocrops that are problematic.

I'm not saying either of you are wrong but the we'll be needing the robots to do it other ways or 10x as many farmers. It takes a ton of labor to deal with weeds and other issues in a more sustainable way

So I understand this is not realistic currently; However where I currently reside, basically everybody grows their own food, and has plenty of time to be doing other things in the meantime.

So while we all need robots, there are probably a hell of a lot of people who would be able to produce even one crop a year in their backyard, who don't bother.

No reason the robots won't reach "other ways" at a point either. I think it will take a lot of combinations of solutions over time.

I still think there should be a lot more rotation between general crops, animal grazing and replenishment cycles. "Live" soil is becoming a problem and we keep extracting/killing it faster than it's getting replenished. Not to mention all the pesticide issues.

We would probably all be much healthier if instead of indirectly subsidizing make-work desk jobs, organic vegetable gardening was subsidized instead.

That would be bad. We would require much more area for the same output.

Gardening would have a higher yield per area than farming. The amount of area needed would decrease. Labor needed would increase.

Not really. Gardening the typical garden crops do - but those are high labor which is why we garden them. You could plant wheat in your garden it would be more labor, but your yields would probably be less, or if you are really good the same.

Most people would be much healthier consuming less soybeans and corn syrup and more garden vegetables.

Actually we would be better consuming more soybeans. Most of it goes to animal feed.

I'm not surprised you're being downvoted. Us lot in India think the occidental culture is inherently mono-cultural; even with all the DEI stuff, all that is being fostered is phenotypic diversity (the most useless type).

Classical India seems to have had better ways. In an introduction to Dharampal's works (who has written a lot of science in pre-Modern India), Claude Alvares notes how the Dutch, who had reduced the grass species to one or two in their land, had the temerity to advise India, where each backyard has(d) hundreds of species of plant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B27IBNotwpE

Pity, everything in India too is rapidly devolving to Anglo-American monoculture now :( They (the elites, who are the ones that really count) barely even speak their own languages now.

On the one hand, the reason for the decline of the various milkweed butterflies appears largely to be a result of areas that once supported some milkweed populations were hit with glyphosate which killed the host plants off at a massive scale. On the other hand this is already happening with chemicals sprayed indiscriminately, this reduces the amount that's sprayed, which could save farmers money, and this reduces glyphosate runoff which is good. Still seems to have the down side that if actually adopted would likely cause even more loss since it could be used on crops where it's avoided now. And no farmer is going to program it to skip milkweed or some other important host plants, they hate milkweed.

Careful usage of cover crops and planting companion plants would be the opposite of that kind of approach. Companion plants will to some degree prevent weeds, generally without competing for the same nutrients as the crop. Usually they're selected based on their ability to attract beneficial insects as well, which function as a form of pest control. This is really only viable at the scale of gardening, but when used effectively, can produce much higher per-area yields.

If non-productive plants and insects are mixed in, you will need more farmland to produce the same amount of crops. In the bigger picture it would be counter productive.

If you think most current conventional fields have weeds i've got really bad news.

>Weeds are the enemy

Yes.

>Zero biodiversity

Good.

No sarcasm, it's true. Most insects are the enemy too.

The philosophy behind modern industrial farming is to basically create a chemical holocaust that extinguishes all plant, animal, and fungal life except the crop.

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