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In your experience, is it accurate that farming practices are a function of labour costs, and what is the time horizon where robotics changes the game for high

In your experience, is it accurate that farming practices are a function of labour costs, and what is the time horizon where robotics changes the game for high density farming with diverse crops? There is a video about using machine vision and lasers for weeding, and I'm wondering whether we are close to full automation and don't need nearly as much land to generate higher yields. Something like what these people do (shipping container farms) https://www.cropbox.co/ https://www.cropbox.co/ seems like we're really close to being able to run restaurants off them.

rocqua 3y ago
Why start on labor costs, and then end on land usage? If healthy farming is limited by labor costs, the result of automation would hopefully be the pickup of healthy farming. The benefits going to quality of produce, long term soil sustainability, reduced usage of fertilizer and water, and other crucial benefits. Taking the advantage and focusing on land usage seems short-sighted to me.
Phileosopher 3y ago
You're definitely on the right track. Over here in Iowa, the dumb labor I've seen has almost exclusively moved to factories, with the full-automation tractors spacing out planting according to prior moisture and soil composition tests run over it by a prior-day tractor. Micro-farming is definitely a hot thing, too. The plants are now getting smaller, but producing huge yields. Food sustainability in someone's suburban backyard is almost here, though I do believe it's a bit more fiddly than the standard old-fashioned greenhouse-then-transfer for personal farming that we've seen for a long time. There's a business model waiting to happen for uninformed city-dwellers who want to get into the space, though it's more about selling education than a tangible product. But, if you're creative and savvy in the biology/botany/ecology space (I'm not), I've seen all sorts of neat configurations. One of the most interesting organic farming techniques I heard of was a guy who had a fish pond on one side, which cycled water to the other side that had a hydroponics setup, meaning it was essentially a micro-ecosystem.

rocqua 3y ago

Why start on labor costs, and then end on land usage? If healthy farming is limited by labor costs, the result of automation would hopefully be the pickup of healthy farming. The benefits going to quality of produce, long term soil sustainability, reduced usage of fertilizer and water, and other crucial benefits. Taking the advantage and focusing on land usage seems short-sighted to me.

Phileosopher 3y ago

You're definitely on the right track. Over here in Iowa, the dumb labor I've seen has almost exclusively moved to factories, with the full-automation tractors spacing out planting according to prior moisture and soil composition tests run over it by a prior-day tractor. Micro-farming is definitely a hot thing, too. The plants are now getting smaller, but producing huge yields. Food sustainability in someone's suburban backyard is almost here, though I do believe it's a bit more fiddly than the standard old-fashioned greenhouse-then-transfer for personal farming that we've seen for a long time. There's a business model waiting to happen for uninformed city-dwellers who want to get into the space, though it's more about selling education than a tangible product. But, if you're creative and savvy in the biology/botany/ecology space (I'm not), I've seen all sorts of neat configurations. One of the most interesting organic farming techniques I heard of was a guy who had a fish pond on one side, which cycled water to the other side that had a hydroponics setup, meaning it was essentially a micro-ecosystem.