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People who don't work with it legitimately do not understand the levels of automation and/or precision involved in large-scale (and medium scale) farms. The ge

People who don't work with it legitimately do not understand the levels of automation and/or precision involved in large-scale (and medium scale) farms. The gentleman who rents our family farm owns or operates about 11k acres. He's a medium sized business. He's a family operation. And he precision farms to the square foot for most row-crop fields. Using thousands of data points from soil condition to weather to historical flood data to local highway traffic patterns. His machinery is (almost) automated. He exists as an emergency off switch, while the tractor and machinery farm to the square foot. They select seed varieties based on the data. Their planter can select any number of up to 20 different varieties based on the outputs of their soil equations, varies the depth, and distance of each individual seed, and plants to the square foot across thousands of acres. Chemical application is dialed in to accuracy within 6" squares. Fertilizer is applied so precisely that the soil generally remains unchanged at the end of the growing season; neither depleted or over fertilized. Animals - they have a breeding program for their cattle, with genetic testing and selection. The cattle are selected for specific genes. Not for traits. For genes. Actual genetics. They don't just breed that bull with these cows because the bull is taller in the back legs and the cows are heavy and short. They select actual genes to pass between generations, and specifically cultivate the genes they want to see. This blows my mind. And this is, again, a medium size business. HUGE agribusinesses take precision to a literal entirely new level. Inputs and outputs measured to the ounce over millions of tons produced. Most processes automated, with a human existing as a kill-switch. It's astounding.

legitster 4y ago
Family farm operations astound me. The amount of things your average farmer has to understand astounds me - finance, labor management, investing, market conditions, futures, contract negotiation. And then on top of that, mastery of up-to-date farming technology. Even a modest 100 acre operation can be a multi-million dollar enterprise designed to eke out cents on the dollar.
- htag 4y ago
  There is a massive difference between a 100 acre farm and a 11k acre farm. A 100 acre farm (producing generic commodity crops) won't have be able to afford fully modern equipment described higher in the comment chain. Even with mostly 20th century equipment you'll be surprised at the ratio of total assets to annual profit for a 100 acre farm. The numbers might be $3M-9M of assets for $100k-300k profit. The economies of scale conspire to push farms to consolidation. The equipment that increases productivity will receive higher usage rates, so capital investments are more efficient. If you have anything between 80-5000 acres you will clearly be better off liquidating everything and playing the markets. It'll be less work, safer, and more profitable. The family farm died in the dust bowl.
  - Loughla 4y ago
    You are correct. The 580 acres we rent was enough for my grandfather to support a family of 10. Today, I could support my family of 3 with that many acres if I ran a show farm near an urban center. But as a working farm it is unfeasible to support a family. It's sad. 500 acres used to be a decent sized operation. Now, 10k is a starting out size.
    - triyambakam 4y ago
      Are you saying that it takes more land to support the same number of people? If so, why? Edit: maybe I'm mixing up the meaning of support here. Do you mean support as in financial support through the farm's profit, or sustenance support, i.e. feeding the family from the farm?
      - comfypotato 4y ago
        Profit, in dollars, per acre has gone down. You need more acres for the same profit. Modern ag-tech is much more efficient.
        jiggywiggy 4y ago
        Your last sentence doesn't make sense. You would expect yield to go up if ag tech is efficiënt. Profit going down is a sign of organisational change.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  No matter what you think about Jeremy Clarkson as a person, Clarkson's Farm on Prime is a pretty eye-opening view to British farming.
  - swores 4y ago
    Is it actually though? I haven't seen it admittedly, but stories like this make me doubt whether it's actually a realistic look at farming at all. > 'Today they’re made in Germany but they still look Lambo-mad,' writes Clarkson, who turned his back on the tractor models recommended to him by other farmers to buy one. 'If an Aventador were to make love to a spaceship, this is what you’d end up with.' > The result is huge, even by tractor standards, he admits: 'Every single farmer type who’s seen it says the same thing. ‘That,’ they intone with a rural tug on the flat cap, ‘is too big.’ But in my mind tractors are like penises. They cannot be too big.' > His Lambo is so huge, in fact, that Clarkson had to build a new barn to house it in. And a new driveway, because it wouldn’t fit through the gates. > Operating it requires great care for more reasons than just its proportions, Jeremy has discovered — due to the amount of torque generated by its straight-six turbodiesel engine (775 lb ft), fitting machinery to the back is a risky business. > 'Not that I can attach anything to its rear end. It’s all heavy engineering back there and I just know that if I tried, you’d be reading about yet another farmer walking for four miles across his fields with his severed arm in a bag.' > Therefore, Clarkson has been forced to hire someone to do that for him. All this together means that the Lamborghini has ended up costing a little bit more than the £40,000 he initially paid for it. https://www.driving.co.uk/news/diversions/clarksons-farm/jeremy-clarkson-bought-lamborghini/ https://www.driving.co.uk/news/diversions/clarksons-farm/jer... I wouldn't know enough about farming to judge the show even if I had watched it, but ultimately his job with the show is to create entertainment, not to accurately document the realities of a British farm, so I find it hard to believe he's managed to do that.
    - theshrike79 4y ago
      The Lambo tractor also has the wrong type of connection in the back (Brits use a different standard or something). He just bought the biggest one he could without thinking. He does go in being The Clarkson, buffooning about and doing things the stupid way. But he does learn and begins to actually enjoy it during the show. And he has Caleb, 20something a farmer who does call him on his buffoonery repeatedly.
- pradn 4y ago
  A hundred acres being modest is still astounding to me. In India, the average is something like 6 acres. The vast majority of farming families have less than 20 acres. Of course, the differences in farming population (something like 700 million) vs land (maybe a third of the US?) make this make sense.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    You get a big tractor and prep or harvest of 100 acres is gonna take like a portion of 1 day.
kristjansson 4y ago
> Fertilizer is applied so precisely that the soil generally remains unchanged at the end of the growing season; neither depleted or over fertilized. That's astounding. Do they apply fertilizer throughout the lifecycle or just at the beginning? Does the balance hold counting irrigation run-off too?
- aeternum 4y ago
  Many states now require normal irrigation runoff to be collected in a reservoir and reused. It's something like the first 2" of water, which covers normal irrigation and most rainfall.
  - kristjansson 4y ago
    Do you have a reference, that sounds interesting and some cursory searching didn't locate anything obvious.
- Loughla 4y ago
  Throughout the lifecyle. There is no irrigation beyond natural irrigation in my part of the country. They clay soil is pretty good at holding onto moisture. But they do factor is runoff. They also use the weather cycle to their advantage, and do not apply near rain events.
markdown 4y ago
> The gentleman who rents our family farm It isn't your family farm anymore. In fact it's nobody's family farm. It's just farmland.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  What were you trying to achieve with this comment? 'our family farm' is a pretty clear indication of the property rights and that gives the OP every right to refer to it as that.
  - markdown 4y ago
    A "family farm" isn't just about ownership. It denotes a type of small owner-operator farm. The GP has leased their land to someone else, so it's no longer their "family farm", and it isn't a "family" farm at all because it isn't run by the family that owns it, but by a corporation with 11k acres under cultivation. It's a big-Ag farm.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      "The farm that was our family farm back when our family farmed, but now we rent it out"? I think it was clear from context.
jelliclesfarm 4y ago
Vertical farming for for produce. It’s entirely different from row cropping commodity crops.
boringg 4y ago
To me this reads as everybody but the farmer has some skin in the game and is extracting their share out of the process and that farmers are completely locked in on vendors. I already know they are locked in on mech equipment, I assume the intelligence layer is the same thing. Threes probably an argument that it increases the amount of food per square acre but my cynical take is it adds more profit margin and to the ever increasing cost of food production per unit of throughput.
- piyh 4y ago
  Yields per acre has been growing linearly for 60 years. It has doubled since 1975. It's largely competitive, not exploitive growth. https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/newsletters/pestandcrop/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/04/fig1.jpeg https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/newsletters/pestandcrop/wp...
- legitster 4y ago
  This was not the situation as I understood it based on the conversation with the guy. Most of the products he is paying for either a) reduce labor costs (like a cell based system that distributes pesticide) or b) reduces the risk of product loss (cherries being insanely delicate and sensitive to subtle changes in temperature and humidity). Because he is paying for the products as-a-service, he really doesn't care about being locked in on the equipment so long as they pay for themselves.
mistermann 4y ago
> And he precision farms to the square foot for most row-crop fields. Using thousands of data points from soil condition to weather to historical flood data to local highway traffic patterns. His machinery... Can anyone recommend or link any YouTube videos on this, I thought this sort of thing was still at the R&d phase, I would love to see an hour long video on a real operation at scale.
temporarara 4y ago
That sounds way more sophisticated than the reality is for the most farmers. Automation exists but usually it's mundane like "my tractor does some proprogrammed routine automatically when U-turn is required on the field while tilling", and even that is enough to get you into the high-tech farmer club.
splistud 4y ago
[dead]
lr1970 4y ago
> People who don't work with it legitimately do not understand the levels of automation and/or precision involved in large-scale (and medium scale) farms. What I do not understand is why vegetables in the US taste like shit and cost 3x as much as in Eastern Europe (Poland, Bulgaria) where agro-automation is much less.
- legitster 4y ago
  High quality stuff is routed to restaurants, farm stands, and farmers markets. Stuff in grocery stores usually comes out of cold storage.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  Having grown up eating wild strawberries, my rule of thumb is that anything artificially made to grow bigger and plumper still has at most the same amount of flavor as the original small wild plant.

legitster 4y ago

Family farm operations astound me. The amount of things your average farmer has to understand astounds me - finance, labor management, investing, market conditions, futures, contract negotiation. And then on top of that, mastery of up-to-date farming technology. Even a modest 100 acre operation can be a multi-million dollar enterprise designed to eke out cents on the dollar.

htag 4y ago
There is a massive difference between a 100 acre farm and a 11k acre farm. A 100 acre farm (producing generic commodity crops) won't have be able to afford fully modern equipment described higher in the comment chain. Even with mostly 20th century equipment you'll be surprised at the ratio of total assets to annual profit for a 100 acre farm. The numbers might be $3M-9M of assets for $100k-300k profit. The economies of scale conspire to push farms to consolidation. The equipment that increases productivity will receive higher usage rates, so capital investments are more efficient. If you have anything between 80-5000 acres you will clearly be better off liquidating everything and playing the markets. It'll be less work, safer, and more profitable. The family farm died in the dust bowl.
- Loughla 4y ago
  You are correct. The 580 acres we rent was enough for my grandfather to support a family of 10. Today, I could support my family of 3 with that many acres if I ran a show farm near an urban center. But as a working farm it is unfeasible to support a family. It's sad. 500 acres used to be a decent sized operation. Now, 10k is a starting out size.
  - triyambakam 4y ago
    Are you saying that it takes more land to support the same number of people? If so, why? Edit: maybe I'm mixing up the meaning of support here. Do you mean support as in financial support through the farm's profit, or sustenance support, i.e. feeding the family from the farm?
    - comfypotato 4y ago
      Profit, in dollars, per acre has gone down. You need more acres for the same profit. Modern ag-tech is much more efficient.
      - jiggywiggy 4y ago
        Your last sentence doesn't make sense. You would expect yield to go up if ag tech is efficiënt. Profit going down is a sign of organisational change.
theshrike79 4y ago
No matter what you think about Jeremy Clarkson as a person, Clarkson's Farm on Prime is a pretty eye-opening view to British farming.
- swores 4y ago
  Is it actually though? I haven't seen it admittedly, but stories like this make me doubt whether it's actually a realistic look at farming at all. > 'Today they’re made in Germany but they still look Lambo-mad,' writes Clarkson, who turned his back on the tractor models recommended to him by other farmers to buy one. 'If an Aventador were to make love to a spaceship, this is what you’d end up with.' > The result is huge, even by tractor standards, he admits: 'Every single farmer type who’s seen it says the same thing. ‘That,’ they intone with a rural tug on the flat cap, ‘is too big.’ But in my mind tractors are like penises. They cannot be too big.' > His Lambo is so huge, in fact, that Clarkson had to build a new barn to house it in. And a new driveway, because it wouldn’t fit through the gates. > Operating it requires great care for more reasons than just its proportions, Jeremy has discovered — due to the amount of torque generated by its straight-six turbodiesel engine (775 lb ft), fitting machinery to the back is a risky business. > 'Not that I can attach anything to its rear end. It’s all heavy engineering back there and I just know that if I tried, you’d be reading about yet another farmer walking for four miles across his fields with his severed arm in a bag.' > Therefore, Clarkson has been forced to hire someone to do that for him. All this together means that the Lamborghini has ended up costing a little bit more than the £40,000 he initially paid for it. https://www.driving.co.uk/news/diversions/clarksons-farm/jeremy-clarkson-bought-lamborghini/ https://www.driving.co.uk/news/diversions/clarksons-farm/jer... I wouldn't know enough about farming to judge the show even if I had watched it, but ultimately his job with the show is to create entertainment, not to accurately document the realities of a British farm, so I find it hard to believe he's managed to do that.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    The Lambo tractor also has the wrong type of connection in the back (Brits use a different standard or something). He just bought the biggest one he could without thinking. He does go in being The Clarkson, buffooning about and doing things the stupid way. But he does learn and begins to actually enjoy it during the show. And he has Caleb, 20something a farmer who does call him on his buffoonery repeatedly.
pradn 4y ago
A hundred acres being modest is still astounding to me. In India, the average is something like 6 acres. The vast majority of farming families have less than 20 acres. Of course, the differences in farming population (something like 700 million) vs land (maybe a third of the US?) make this make sense.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  You get a big tractor and prep or harvest of 100 acres is gonna take like a portion of 1 day.

kristjansson 4y ago

> Fertilizer is applied so precisely that the soil generally remains unchanged at the end of the growing season; neither depleted or over fertilized. That's astounding. Do they apply fertilizer throughout the lifecycle or just at the beginning? Does the balance hold counting irrigation run-off too?

aeternum 4y ago
Many states now require normal irrigation runoff to be collected in a reservoir and reused. It's something like the first 2" of water, which covers normal irrigation and most rainfall.
- kristjansson 4y ago
  Do you have a reference, that sounds interesting and some cursory searching didn't locate anything obvious.
Loughla 4y ago
Throughout the lifecyle. There is no irrigation beyond natural irrigation in my part of the country. They clay soil is pretty good at holding onto moisture. But they do factor is runoff. They also use the weather cycle to their advantage, and do not apply near rain events.

markdown 4y ago

> The gentleman who rents our family farm It isn't your family farm anymore. In fact it's nobody's family farm. It's just farmland.

jacquesm 4y ago
What were you trying to achieve with this comment? 'our family farm' is a pretty clear indication of the property rights and that gives the OP every right to refer to it as that.
- markdown 4y ago
  A "family farm" isn't just about ownership. It denotes a type of small owner-operator farm. The GP has leased their land to someone else, so it's no longer their "family farm", and it isn't a "family" farm at all because it isn't run by the family that owns it, but by a corporation with 11k acres under cultivation. It's a big-Ag farm.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    "The farm that was our family farm back when our family farmed, but now we rent it out"? I think it was clear from context.

jelliclesfarm 4y ago

Vertical farming for for produce. It’s entirely different from row cropping commodity crops.

boringg 4y ago

To me this reads as everybody but the farmer has some skin in the game and is extracting their share out of the process and that farmers are completely locked in on vendors. I already know they are locked in on mech equipment, I assume the intelligence layer is the same thing. Threes probably an argument that it increases the amount of food per square acre but my cynical take is it adds more profit margin and to the ever increasing cost of food production per unit of throughput.

piyh 4y ago
Yields per acre has been growing linearly for 60 years. It has doubled since 1975. It's largely competitive, not exploitive growth. https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/newsletters/pestandcrop/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/04/fig1.jpeg https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/newsletters/pestandcrop/wp...
legitster 4y ago
This was not the situation as I understood it based on the conversation with the guy. Most of the products he is paying for either a) reduce labor costs (like a cell based system that distributes pesticide) or b) reduces the risk of product loss (cherries being insanely delicate and sensitive to subtle changes in temperature and humidity). Because he is paying for the products as-a-service, he really doesn't care about being locked in on the equipment so long as they pay for themselves.

mistermann 4y ago

> And he precision farms to the square foot for most row-crop fields. Using thousands of data points from soil condition to weather to historical flood data to local highway traffic patterns. His machinery... Can anyone recommend or link any YouTube videos on this, I thought this sort of thing was still at the R&d phase, I would love to see an hour long video on a real operation at scale.

temporarara 4y ago

That sounds way more sophisticated than the reality is for the most farmers. Automation exists but usually it's mundane like "my tractor does some proprogrammed routine automatically when U-turn is required on the field while tilling", and even that is enough to get you into the high-tech farmer club.

splistud 4y ago

[dead]

lr1970 4y ago

> People who don't work with it legitimately do not understand the levels of automation and/or precision involved in large-scale (and medium scale) farms. What I do not understand is why vegetables in the US taste like shit and cost 3x as much as in Eastern Europe (Poland, Bulgaria) where agro-automation is much less.

legitster 4y ago
High quality stuff is routed to restaurants, farm stands, and farmers markets. Stuff in grocery stores usually comes out of cold storage.
yencabulator 4y ago
Having grown up eating wild strawberries, my rule of thumb is that anything artificially made to grow bigger and plumper still has at most the same amount of flavor as the original small wild plant.