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There's lots of labor-intensive ways to boost yields without monocultures, fertilizers, and pesticides, right? Planting complementary crops together, planting

There's lots of labor-intensive ways to boost yields without monocultures, fertilizers, and pesticides, right? Planting complementary crops together, planting trap crops at the edges of fields to catch pests, things like that. How long till robots can do that sort of work? At that point, you can have super-green-bio gardens (fields) worked and pruned 24/7 at the cost-over-time of the robots (and whoever/whatever oversees them, plus manure I guess). We already have a version of this- called a combine harvester- but the more sophisticated farming tech gets, the more it can reduce reliance on e.g. pesticides without reducing yields.

space_fountain 5y ago
Hum, that does seem somewhat possible. I guess my counter is just pointing back at the biomass chart. Maybe labor intensive low fertilizer and pesticide farming can work, but we're talking about a majority of land vertebrate mass being either humans or the things we've grown to eat. There isn't a world in which we keep that up and don't massively distort the rest of the natural world. I think we have to accept that and sort of go on from there and decides what sort of distortions we want. Trading mechanization for pesticides seems great, but we'll still need massive amounts of land dedicated to farming and I definitely see it as a more technical not less solution