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AI is coming for agriculture, but farmers aren’t convinced
- erikerikson 1y ago> Our research team conducted more than 35 interviews with farmers, specifically livestock producers Not agriculture, cattle
- seadan83 1y ago"Cattle production is the most important U.S. agricultural industry" [1] "Animal husbandry, is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, or other products" [2] [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/sector-at-a-glance https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_husbandry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_husbandry
- erikerikson 1y agoThanks for the definitions. Doesn't make for a better existential generalization from the more specific to the more general term.
- seadan83 1y agoI have trouble following: "Doesn't make for a better existential generalization from the more specific to the more general term." I kinda think I know what you mean, but could use clarification as I might be offbase. Sorry to reply with only definitions. Just giving evidence that livestock farming is considered agriculture.
- erikerikson 1y agoWhat I wrote was a clumsy way to express the thought and particularly to use the term "existential generalization". I was thinking that agriculture doesn't include livestock, which was wrong and you pointed that out (thank you :D). I still object to the headline because "agriculture + farmer = crops" whereas "agriculture + rancher = livestock" they interviewed ranchers in one country and came out with a headline that made an assertion about farmers which seems like generalizing into agriculture and then re-instantiating into a subclass. The latter is valid to do but the generalization is taking finding about a smaller class and making claims about the broader class which is error prone at best. This occurs in a context where I have been reading about the use of machine learning for weed identification, weather prediction, saturation analysis, and a whole host of other purposes in the more crop oriented side of agriculture. That made the headline curious but I felt a bit lied to by it which fueled my original objection.
- lostlogin 1y agoA large industry, but also a much smaller group than ‘live stock producers’.
- throwaway070625 1y agoAnd the cattle farmers massively benefit from these things. There are now custom monitors being put on to cattle that constantly measure how much they eat, how much they walk, body temp, etc. If they fall out of expected range the system will call a vet automatically to come treat them as they're obviously sick. This is keeping the cattle healthier and the production numbers high. Farmers are also really getting into things like drones for pesticide application as it's faster, more accurate, and has less waste. It's happening whether or not people want to believe it, from Texas up to Illinois/Wisconsin and everywhere inbetween. hey, if you want to get away from big tech and you're not scared of rural life -- farmers need IT folks. They have racks of Supermicro servers on premises that need maintaining because they can't trust the cloud // internet can be unreliable. They have sensors and repeaters on the field perimeters that need maintenance. There's a lot of IT work to be done in rural America with a slower pace of life if you're not afraid of coexisting with country folk. For those of us that grew up there and migrated to the city for corporate IT jobs -- I expect we'll be going back to our roots and serving our communities with these skills instead so we don't have to deal with AI screened jobs and take-home programming tests
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoThe way they are treating cattle as pure machines to optimize production I can only hope synthetic meat will come soon.
- phil21 1y agoThis is effectively my "dream" job for semi-retirement at the moment. I don't need to make top dollar any longer, but I crave doing something "real" that actually matters and I work for/talk to people who actually make useful things for humanity. I still need a decent income to pay for toys, hobbies, and time off work until I hit retirement age. A contracting IT job trekking between a few farms and monitoring them remotely sounds pretty great to me! And right up my alley in terms of skillsets and interests.
- onecommentman 1y agoIf you’re talking about racks of servers, you’re talking a pretty large farming operation…they’re a bit rare. And those kids of farmers would like to stay in the community with well-paying jobs, and so communities try to raise their IT specialists locally and tend not to outsource even to the local Big City if they can help it. Farmer kids have ag in their blood and can support IT more effectively with that homegrown subject expertise.
- Scoundreller 1y agoI wonder how long GMO (the in the lab kind) took to get adopted after surely initial resistance. Will we see AI-free food? Will it become a part of being “organic”?
- tartoran 1y agoSomething like AI hallucinated produce? Random taste tomatoes anyone? Leaving the joke aside, probably GMO will probably accelerate with the help of AI and will still be called GMO foods.
- akomtu 1y ago"Human made" will be a sign of quality, like the "organic" label.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoGMO was already adopted before the resistance even manifested. It was a little bit more crude in the early days. Irradiate a field and select desirable traits among the mutants.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoYour comment sent me down a rabbit hole. I assumed that GMO referred strictly to transgenic organisms, but the definition varies so much that even selective breeding has been considered GMO. So I guess we have had GMOs since the beginning of agriculture.
- conradfr 1y ago> what farmers want: technologies that may not have a lot of bells and whistles, but can reliably take a task off their hands. I'm sure they are not alone.
- fouronnes3 1y agoTIL I am a bugs farmer, not a software engineer.
- mycall 1y agoI am a backlog, hear me score.
- drewcoo 1y ago>> but can reliably take a task off their hands Tasks can reliably take off farmers' hands. Every year our state fair has dioramas to demonstrate the risks of mangling, amputation, and death. I don't really want to see hallucinating LLMs making this even more dangerous despite how good it may make VCs feel. It's possible for it to not be a closed system but have someone's gain mean someone else's loss. (Arguments over closed vs open system are a sophistic tactic to ruin other people's lives for money.)
- Scoundreller 1y ago> When human bodies are scarce, as they often are in rural Australia, machines are created to fill the void. I think they meant where labour costs are more than their ability to pay
- oblio 1y agoAgriculture is bottom of the barrel business because no political power worth its weight allows price gouging. Food has to be kept as cheap as possible because otherwise the economy doesn't work. The workaround for this is subsidies, but those don't scale. You can't agriculture your way into Google Ads, the money printing machine.
- ericyd 1y agoCould you elaborate on "subsidies don't scale"? In the US, farm subsidies are a huge chunk of our budget and, to the best of my understanding, help keep food prices low. I'm not informed enough to know if it's an inefficient solution though.
- Onavo 1y agoThe subsidies are combined with cheap indentured semi legal labor from south of the border. Remove either one and the whole system falls apart.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIndentured?
- tocs3 1y agoThis reply is a little off the cuff but the "Indentured" is referring to the fact that the workers cannot just pick up and leave without consequences. They do not have transportation so would have to just walk home and are not holding the visas so hey could face consequences involving law enforcement.
- frainfreeze 1y agoWaiting for the title to change to "The future of farming"
- bryanlarsen 1y agoI dream that AI robotic drones can reduce our dependence on vulnerable monocultures. Rather than a monoculture processed by million dollar combine harvesters using bulk techniques, a polyculture harvested by a swarm of small cheaper drones that work at the individual plant level.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoI hope it goes that way bit I expect the opposite. They way big ag doesn't show much respect for nature I expect them to go even more into monoculture and using robots to wipe out all insects and plants they don't like.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoThey'll do it if it's profitable. More output per acre is a pretty big motivation. Grad students will work on the problem for the ecological benefits. Then big ag will scoop it up for the profit motive.
- bgnn 1y agoI think this isn't going to hapen. The economy of the scale favors monoculture and it combines well with automation. The most likely outcome will be that combine harvester not requiring a driver and a synchronous operation of multiple harvesters as a robot swarm such that much bigger fields than currently possible could be worked: monoculture at a much bigger scale.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoPolyculture has two very significant advantages. - Because you're pulling multiple crops off a field instead of one, the value of those crops is significantly higher. - The crop is much more resilient. The different crops will have different tolerances to drought, disease, insects, wind and other disasters that commonly affect farming. When farmland was cheap you could increase your profits per employee by buying more land and bigger machinery. But these days farmland is expensive and farmers are concentrating more on increasing yields per acre. In my area farmers spend > 10x as much per acre on inputs like fertilizers and pesticides than they used to in the 90's. Polyculture will be hard and expensive, but if it lets you double profit per acre, farmers will do it.
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y agoAgriculture is one of the few fields where "shit in" is a expected, good thing. A fertiliser on the fields.
- theodric 1y agoI don't need (more) automation on this farm, I need (lots) of help shifting product. I can make a lot more than I'm able to sell!
- zkmon 1y agoIn developing countries, farming is left for those who has no opportunity or ability to do any other better work. Often uneducated, poorer, living in remote places without basic facilities. Result? The farmers are forced to do extensive use of chemicals in farming, low nutrition, high yield GM/hybrid varieties and adulteration of whole foods. The food that comes out is laced with chemicals, poor quality varieties. And the urban consumer pays for their negligence of the farmer.
- onecommentman 1y agoIn low income economies over 50% of population 10 years and older own a mobile phone. https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-mobile-phone-ownership/ https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24... Access to information even for the global poor is almost universal. But like the old joke about the ag extension agent trying to get a farmer to improve his practices with information, “Heck, I don’t farm as well as I know how to today.”
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- andrewrn 1y agoI worked on strawberry picking robots for a few years as a field robotics engineer. I don't know about Australia but for American fruit growers and to a lesser extent, British ones, the tasks that are actually economically valuable are shockingly hard technically. Picking strawberries at a rate that beats human pickers, given the endless amount of variables, is insanely hard. Why not pick another task like data collection, you ask, because its just not important enough. So what you have is a bunch of techbros making SISP's and attracting VC's who are hopped up on SaaS sugar rushes, the tech doesn't work and the company folds, and the farmers get disillusioned and less amicable to the next entreprenuer. In 2025, we're in like the third cycle of this.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoOnly the third? I remember reading an article about a plant orientation sensor for an automated farm robot in 1993
- andrewrn 1y agoYeah maybe more. I directly participated in the 2019-2023 hype cycle for AgTech
- euroderf 1y agoWho is going to sell me a system where I stick a couple of Zigbee sensors in my home vegetable garden and I take pictures of the garden once or twice a day and the system uses this info plus weather data to tell me what I need to do the next morning ?
- NoPicklez 1y agoFunny talking about the Suzuki Sierra, the Toyota Landcruiser 70 series is exactly this. It's a $90k (AUD) ute that has almost no bells and whistles but its basically bulletproof.