7 ms·

The future of agriculture

130 points by ehudla 10y ago

akiselev 10y ago
Agriculture is set for the next big revolution in the next few decades. Many thousands of years ago, developments like horticulture, domestication, the wheel, roads, and non-nomadic life styles collided together and built upon each other exponentially, ushering the first agricultural revolution. Then we had breakthroughs in trains, synthetic fertilizer, refrigerated cars, and all of the other industrialization technologies in the 19th century, which again changed the face of food and how it was grown and distributed. I'm sure I missed a few eras but these are the two big ones. Now we've got globalization resulting in much cheaper technology and expanded markets, artificial intelligence and machine learning, ultra cheap wireless communication, ubiquitous software, and last but not least, biotechnology. As the latter advances, it will kick everything into high gear, as it already has with companies like Monsanto and Climate Corporation. Even something as simple as eliminating nitrogen from fertilizer through genetic engineering or directed evolution would have a tremendous impact on the sustainability and ecological impact of industrialized farming. This is a good time for farmers who are always at the mercy of so many variables which they are finally starting to dig into, quantify, and control. Farms, especially smaller ones, are almost always in debt that they have to borrow before every planting and a single underperforming harvest can wipe out the business so all this added certainty is going to do everyone a world of good.
- justaaron 10y ago
  we could stand studying how ecosystem components interact a bit more. These "variables" and "externalities" you describe are the real world outside our bubble of infantile understandings and knowledge.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    Our understanding is infantile because our technology is infantile and there is no way to escape that. How would you propose we study an ecosystem where we can't even isolate and analyze the majority of bacterial, fungal, and viral species let alone study or simulate their interactions with each other and crops at the scale of even a square meter plot? I agree that we should be studying this area more (a LOT more), but there will always be existential risks with everything we do, regardless of how much time and care we put into our work. I for one refuse to let hundreds of millions or billions suffer and die when we have the technology to save them just because the unknowable risks offend someone's sensibilities. You and I will likely be dead by the time the consequences are felt, but we can't let all those hungry people die in the mean time just because of FUD.
- fanquake 10y ago
  "..have to borrow before every planting" This is not limited to just small farms. In Western Australia, farm debt has been growing 8% per annum since 2000. The average farm size here is ~3500ha (8650acres).
  - akiselev 10y ago
    I'm curious if Australia is a special case because of the drought [1]. It began in earnest in 1995 and was named record setting by 2003 so I can imagine the farms had to do a lot more borrowing and refinancing at unfavorable terms in order to make it through more than a decade and a half of very low rainfall. According to [2] the Australian government provided $4.5 billion in exceptional circumstance assistance which included monetary payments and interest rate subsidies. Even with that assistance I would imagine that the drought hit Australian farmers really hard. I tried looking at the agriculture.gov.au site for import statistics but couldn't easily figure out if agricultural imports grew during that time period, and whether that hurt the domestic farms as well. It'll be interesting to see if California farms' debt balloons like this too as they have to borrow more and more to pay for water rights and infrastructure like wells. California is basically the US's fertile crescent so maybe there will be a lot more subsidies and federal assistance just to maintain food security as a national strategic goal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought [2] http://www.theage.com.au//breaking-news-national/minister-declares-end-of-drought-20120427-1xpgi.html http://www.theage.com.au//breaking-news-national/minister-de...
justaaron 10y ago
Stopped at second sentence: "fortunately" Authors bias. Is this another techno-utopian rant extolling the virtues of everything unsustainable in modern society in prescriptive format for agriculture by urban white collar workers who never touched soil in their life but take gadget buying advice from Wired.com?
- orf 10y ago
  > Is this another... Maybe you should read it and find out, rather than be perturbed by a single word.
  - justaaron 10y ago
    true. I did. I enjoyed the panel entitled "bugs in the system" as it aknowledges the complexity I'm hinting at. I'd like to see more study of natural ecosystems in such a way that we adapted the human behavior around the already-occuring processes, and less modelling of the planet around 20th century suburban design ideals etc. one of the largest factors that I contend will emerge will be the rebirth of local food production, perhaps technologically assisted in some regions as needed, largely due to our passing of the "negligible shipping costs" tipping point as well as improved understandings of locality, microbial cultures, and multi-celled organism interactions etc.
    - Thupli 10y ago
      I'm pretty sympathetic to the gist of your comments here (e.g., microbial ecologies, local food production,etc.), but probably fall on the 'need more and better tech' side of things when looking forward along several global trends. Population growth and movements and climate change are two such trends. I'm reaching here because I dont recall the details but I seem to remember reading about Indian grain production needing to industrialize in order to satisfy its near future domestic demand. I'd love to get some recommendations for books dealing with large-scale food production (not saying 'factory' but rather 'national', for example) from an econ perspective.
      - 10y ago
repliculture 10y ago
While accurate on many of the recent developments, this article missed (as many precision ag/genetics editorials do) some of the key drawbacks to industrialized agriculture: 1. Herbicide resistance. We now have weeds that are simultaneously resistant to many different modes of action. Even if one were able to eliminate the impact of pesticides on the environment, it is impossible to develop new chemicals and stacked herbicides faster than evolution can find ways to work around them. 2. There are other drawbacks to monoculture ag, namely soil loss, lower quality of soil structure/microbiota, loss of ecosystem services such as habitat, etc. Increasing our yields per acre is great but we need to factor in all of the externalities. I was glad to see mention of finding new ways to associate rhizobia with cereals, but that's a long way off and for the time being no one has figured out how to have agriculture avoid massive imports (even in organic ag) of nutrients into the system. 3. Exclusive focus on the biggest staple crops, with far more emphasis on quantity than quality and producing food that is necessary for a well-rounded diet. 4. Nearly all of these solutions ignore the possibility of using ecological interactions, unique spatial designs, intercropping, perennials and other agroecological strategies to reduce weed pressure, increase nitrogen fixation etc. These other techniques are far harder and are more difficult to commercialize, but if one wants to tackle "hard" problems in agriculture, those would be the ones to address. Just to be clear, much good will come out of the technological developments, but for the moment they're primarily tinkering around the edges when really we need a whole-systems redesign for agriculture. I recently finished a PhD focused on optimizing decisions given all of the uncertainty/variability in precision ag systems, and what I ultimately concluded (at least for row crops) is we still have a long way to go.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  The story of soil is a tremendously powerful one. Ken Burns The Dust Bowl is re-airing currently (it was originally broadcast in 2012). It tells the story of the combined impacts of: 1) massive immigration onto the high western prarie, 2) mechanised agriculture, 3) hitting a period of higher rainfall, initially, 4) a false belief that "rain follows the plow", 5) intensive crop development, 6) deep plowing of virgin prarie, 7) economic cycles and patterns, affecting lending, loan conditions, ag market conditions, 8) the response of farmers -- as crop prices fell, they planted more -- because this was their only source of income, and their pattern (or antipattern) was to try what hadn't worked, but harder. The results were staggering. From 1934-40 depending on the area, but most especially over the Oklahoma Panhandle and surrounding regions, crops were lost, families bankrupted, farms reposessed, banks failed, telephone companies failed. And up to 75% of topsoil, a one-time bounty that accumulates at the rate of a few inches per century, was lost. Only 25% of the lost land productivity was recovered. Human hubris in the face of humble dirt is a category error.
tspike 10y ago
Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health -- his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order -- a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind. This is a passage from Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America. His premise is that viewing agriculture as an equation to be solved is fundamentally incompatible with maintaining the land's carrying capacity. akiselev said in another comment, "How would you propose we study an ecosystem where we can't even isolate and analyze the majority of bacterial, fungal, and viral species let alone study or simulate their interactions with each other and crops at the scale of even a square meter plot?" We already have the knowledge of how to sustainably farm land without irreparably damaging the ecosystem (although it is dying fast); we are simply unwilling to work as hard as it would take to do it and are hoping for a technological breakthrough from an expert to solve problems we can't even verbalize.
- akiselev 10y ago
  We can verbalize the problem: our population growth has outpaced our investment in agricultural technology and infrastructure such that in order to even try to feed everyone, we have to turn to ever more drastic measures that are unsustainable or carry worrying existential risks. It is only in the last decade or so that farmers are finally going full force in with tech that was standard factory equipment thirty or even fifty years ago except now designed for farmers. There is no technological breakthrough coming, we already have all of the technology and the rate at which its costs are dropping is monumental. Finally the low margin businesses that feed the human race are able to afford it. As the article talks about, this is largely because the old equipment and seed manufacturers, the ones the farmers trust for their farm, are finally starting to provide "smart" machinery and even cloud services with mesh sensor networks. Combine this with genetic engineering of nitrogen fixating bacteria, breeding guided by genetic screening, and all of the hard work that people like Norman Borlaug have done and will do and we will be able to sustainably feed our civilization without a high chance of running face first into an ecological catastrophe.
fanquake 10y ago
In Australia, there's a far greater yield benefit to be gained from farmers buying a deep-ripper/mulboard plough(break the hard pan and allow root growth), switching to CTF(prevent a hard pan from happening again), switch to a no/minimum till system, spreading lime(correct soil pH) and maybe spreading clay (mitigate soil erosion). All of these practises are also "low-tech". You'd want to use VR maps to spread your lime[0], and possibly clay (although it's fair easier to pick out soil erosion by eye as opposed to varying pH), so it's probably not needed. Once you've sorted out the fundamentals, then it makes sense to start more precision ag. There's no point trying to grow a 5t crop when your roots can't even get down to the soil moisture. [0] Example VR lime maps, pick Lime from the available layers - https://hectare.ag/nooka https://hectare.ag/nooka
- keithnz 10y ago
  I work for a company where we sell lots of Ag monitoring stuff. We are based in NZ, but sell into Australia and are now also moving into the Central Valley. Many get a lot of benefit from managing their water.
  - Thupli 10y ago
    Anyway you can point me towards more information about your company and its instrumentation? I moved to the Central Valley recently and have been searching in vain for some technician type work in ag/soil moisture monitoring.
    - keithnz 10y ago
      we sell our soil moisture monitoring through... http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/ http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/
tridentlead 10y ago
A lot of interesting work has been done by the Israeli hydroponics industry around water conservation like some of the stuff in this article (as they grow their food in very high temperatures).
- ehudla 10y ago
  As well as high-tech/data science techniques in the quest for greater milk production.
epicaricacy 10y ago
FTA: >RTDS has already created one commercial product, a form of rape Whoa whoa whoa. Phrasing.

130 points by ehudla 10y ago

Agriculture is set for the next big revolution in the next few decades. Many thousands of years ago, developments like horticulture, domestication, the wheel, roads, and non-nomadic life styles collided together and built upon each other exponentially, ushering the first agricultural revolution. Then we had breakthroughs in trains, synthetic fertilizer, refrigerated cars, and all of the other industrialization technologies in the 19th century, which again changed the face of food and how it was grown and distributed. I'm sure I missed a few eras but these are the two big ones. Now we've got globalization resulting in much cheaper technology and expanded markets, artificial intelligence and machine learning, ultra cheap wireless communication, ubiquitous software, and last but not least, biotechnology. As the latter advances, it will kick everything into high gear, as it already has with companies like Monsanto and Climate Corporation. Even something as simple as eliminating nitrogen from fertilizer through genetic engineering or directed evolution would have a tremendous impact on the sustainability and ecological impact of industrialized farming. This is a good time for farmers who are always at the mercy of so many variables which they are finally starting to dig into, quantify, and control. Farms, especially smaller ones, are almost always in debt that they have to borrow before every planting and a single underperforming harvest can wipe out the business so all this added certainty is going to do everyone a world of good.

justaaron 10y ago
we could stand studying how ecosystem components interact a bit more. These "variables" and "externalities" you describe are the real world outside our bubble of infantile understandings and knowledge.
- akiselev 10y ago
  Our understanding is infantile because our technology is infantile and there is no way to escape that. How would you propose we study an ecosystem where we can't even isolate and analyze the majority of bacterial, fungal, and viral species let alone study or simulate their interactions with each other and crops at the scale of even a square meter plot? I agree that we should be studying this area more (a LOT more), but there will always be existential risks with everything we do, regardless of how much time and care we put into our work. I for one refuse to let hundreds of millions or billions suffer and die when we have the technology to save them just because the unknowable risks offend someone's sensibilities. You and I will likely be dead by the time the consequences are felt, but we can't let all those hungry people die in the mean time just because of FUD.
fanquake 10y ago
"..have to borrow before every planting" This is not limited to just small farms. In Western Australia, farm debt has been growing 8% per annum since 2000. The average farm size here is ~3500ha (8650acres).
- akiselev 10y ago
  I'm curious if Australia is a special case because of the drought [1]. It began in earnest in 1995 and was named record setting by 2003 so I can imagine the farms had to do a lot more borrowing and refinancing at unfavorable terms in order to make it through more than a decade and a half of very low rainfall. According to [2] the Australian government provided $4.5 billion in exceptional circumstance assistance which included monetary payments and interest rate subsidies. Even with that assistance I would imagine that the drought hit Australian farmers really hard. I tried looking at the agriculture.gov.au site for import statistics but couldn't easily figure out if agricultural imports grew during that time period, and whether that hurt the domestic farms as well. It'll be interesting to see if California farms' debt balloons like this too as they have to borrow more and more to pay for water rights and infrastructure like wells. California is basically the US's fertile crescent so maybe there will be a lot more subsidies and federal assistance just to maintain food security as a national strategic goal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought [2] http://www.theage.com.au//breaking-news-national/minister-declares-end-of-drought-20120427-1xpgi.html http://www.theage.com.au//breaking-news-national/minister-de...

justaaron 10y ago

Stopped at second sentence: "fortunately" Authors bias. Is this another techno-utopian rant extolling the virtues of everything unsustainable in modern society in prescriptive format for agriculture by urban white collar workers who never touched soil in their life but take gadget buying advice from Wired.com?

orf 10y ago
> Is this another... Maybe you should read it and find out, rather than be perturbed by a single word.
- justaaron 10y ago
  true. I did. I enjoyed the panel entitled "bugs in the system" as it aknowledges the complexity I'm hinting at. I'd like to see more study of natural ecosystems in such a way that we adapted the human behavior around the already-occuring processes, and less modelling of the planet around 20th century suburban design ideals etc. one of the largest factors that I contend will emerge will be the rebirth of local food production, perhaps technologically assisted in some regions as needed, largely due to our passing of the "negligible shipping costs" tipping point as well as improved understandings of locality, microbial cultures, and multi-celled organism interactions etc.
  - Thupli 10y ago
    I'm pretty sympathetic to the gist of your comments here (e.g., microbial ecologies, local food production,etc.), but probably fall on the 'need more and better tech' side of things when looking forward along several global trends. Population growth and movements and climate change are two such trends. I'm reaching here because I dont recall the details but I seem to remember reading about Indian grain production needing to industrialize in order to satisfy its near future domestic demand. I'd love to get some recommendations for books dealing with large-scale food production (not saying 'factory' but rather 'national', for example) from an econ perspective.
    - 10y ago

repliculture 10y ago

While accurate on many of the recent developments, this article missed (as many precision ag/genetics editorials do) some of the key drawbacks to industrialized agriculture: 1. Herbicide resistance. We now have weeds that are simultaneously resistant to many different modes of action. Even if one were able to eliminate the impact of pesticides on the environment, it is impossible to develop new chemicals and stacked herbicides faster than evolution can find ways to work around them. 2. There are other drawbacks to monoculture ag, namely soil loss, lower quality of soil structure/microbiota, loss of ecosystem services such as habitat, etc. Increasing our yields per acre is great but we need to factor in all of the externalities. I was glad to see mention of finding new ways to associate rhizobia with cereals, but that's a long way off and for the time being no one has figured out how to have agriculture avoid massive imports (even in organic ag) of nutrients into the system. 3. Exclusive focus on the biggest staple crops, with far more emphasis on quantity than quality and producing food that is necessary for a well-rounded diet. 4. Nearly all of these solutions ignore the possibility of using ecological interactions, unique spatial designs, intercropping, perennials and other agroecological strategies to reduce weed pressure, increase nitrogen fixation etc. These other techniques are far harder and are more difficult to commercialize, but if one wants to tackle "hard" problems in agriculture, those would be the ones to address. Just to be clear, much good will come out of the technological developments, but for the moment they're primarily tinkering around the edges when really we need a whole-systems redesign for agriculture. I recently finished a PhD focused on optimizing decisions given all of the uncertainty/variability in precision ag systems, and what I ultimately concluded (at least for row crops) is we still have a long way to go.

dredmorbius 10y ago
The story of soil is a tremendously powerful one. Ken Burns The Dust Bowl is re-airing currently (it was originally broadcast in 2012). It tells the story of the combined impacts of: 1) massive immigration onto the high western prarie, 2) mechanised agriculture, 3) hitting a period of higher rainfall, initially, 4) a false belief that "rain follows the plow", 5) intensive crop development, 6) deep plowing of virgin prarie, 7) economic cycles and patterns, affecting lending, loan conditions, ag market conditions, 8) the response of farmers -- as crop prices fell, they planted more -- because this was their only source of income, and their pattern (or antipattern) was to try what hadn't worked, but harder. The results were staggering. From 1934-40 depending on the area, but most especially over the Oklahoma Panhandle and surrounding regions, crops were lost, families bankrupted, farms reposessed, banks failed, telephone companies failed. And up to 75% of topsoil, a one-time bounty that accumulates at the rate of a few inches per century, was lost. Only 25% of the lost land productivity was recovered. Human hubris in the face of humble dirt is a category error.

tspike 10y ago

Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health -- his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order -- a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind. This is a passage from Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America. His premise is that viewing agriculture as an equation to be solved is fundamentally incompatible with maintaining the land's carrying capacity. akiselev said in another comment, "How would you propose we study an ecosystem where we can't even isolate and analyze the majority of bacterial, fungal, and viral species let alone study or simulate their interactions with each other and crops at the scale of even a square meter plot?" We already have the knowledge of how to sustainably farm land without irreparably damaging the ecosystem (although it is dying fast); we are simply unwilling to work as hard as it would take to do it and are hoping for a technological breakthrough from an expert to solve problems we can't even verbalize.

akiselev 10y ago
We can verbalize the problem: our population growth has outpaced our investment in agricultural technology and infrastructure such that in order to even try to feed everyone, we have to turn to ever more drastic measures that are unsustainable or carry worrying existential risks. It is only in the last decade or so that farmers are finally going full force in with tech that was standard factory equipment thirty or even fifty years ago except now designed for farmers. There is no technological breakthrough coming, we already have all of the technology and the rate at which its costs are dropping is monumental. Finally the low margin businesses that feed the human race are able to afford it. As the article talks about, this is largely because the old equipment and seed manufacturers, the ones the farmers trust for their farm, are finally starting to provide "smart" machinery and even cloud services with mesh sensor networks. Combine this with genetic engineering of nitrogen fixating bacteria, breeding guided by genetic screening, and all of the hard work that people like Norman Borlaug have done and will do and we will be able to sustainably feed our civilization without a high chance of running face first into an ecological catastrophe.

fanquake 10y ago

In Australia, there's a far greater yield benefit to be gained from farmers buying a deep-ripper/mulboard plough(break the hard pan and allow root growth), switching to CTF(prevent a hard pan from happening again), switch to a no/minimum till system, spreading lime(correct soil pH) and maybe spreading clay (mitigate soil erosion). All of these practises are also "low-tech". You'd want to use VR maps to spread your lime[0], and possibly clay (although it's fair easier to pick out soil erosion by eye as opposed to varying pH), so it's probably not needed. Once you've sorted out the fundamentals, then it makes sense to start more precision ag. There's no point trying to grow a 5t crop when your roots can't even get down to the soil moisture. [0] Example VR lime maps, pick Lime from the available layers - https://hectare.ag/nooka https://hectare.ag/nooka

keithnz 10y ago
I work for a company where we sell lots of Ag monitoring stuff. We are based in NZ, but sell into Australia and are now also moving into the Central Valley. Many get a lot of benefit from managing their water.
- Thupli 10y ago
  Anyway you can point me towards more information about your company and its instrumentation? I moved to the Central Valley recently and have been searching in vain for some technician type work in ag/soil moisture monitoring.
  - keithnz 10y ago
    we sell our soil moisture monitoring through... http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/ http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/

tridentlead 10y ago

A lot of interesting work has been done by the Israeli hydroponics industry around water conservation like some of the stuff in this article (as they grow their food in very high temperatures).

ehudla 10y ago
As well as high-tech/data science techniques in the quest for greater milk production.

epicaricacy 10y ago

FTA: >RTDS has already created one commercial product, a form of rape Whoa whoa whoa. Phrasing.