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I 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 combin
by bgnn 1y ago
I 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.
- bgnn 1y agoI would love that to happen. It will happen if it's economically more competitive.
- analog31 1y agoThe two crops are corn and soybeans. Everything else is decimal dust. I'm not sure how much sense it makes to mix them within a plot, as opposed to mixing them by crop rotation. Also, all of the crops have to be herbicide resistant to coexist with corn and beans. Now, for things like veggies, sure.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoIt makes a lot of sense to mix corns and beans. Corn is usually more profitable than soybeans, but they are rotated for soil health reasons. If you planted both together you wouldn't have to rotate. Corn & beans are 2 of the "three sisters", the traditional native American agriculture technique.
- analog31 1y agoWill the beans get any sun?
- bryanlarsen 1y agoYou'd want to grow a shade tolerant bean, like cornfield beans. 80% of soybeans are fed to animals; the pigs won't care what type of bean they get fed.
- analog31 1y agoIndeed, the only variable is yield.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoYou're not going to get a full yield of either the corn or the beans, but the corn harvest should be pretty close to a full yield and then the beans are pure bonus.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoHow would you harvest them separately? Or is the plan to harvest them together and let the combine sort it out?
- bryanlarsen 1y agoThey're highly unlikely to be ripe at the same time. The idea is to basically do it the same way the native Americans did, except using robots instead of humans. Which is how gardeners do it today. You regularly walk the field, removing the ripe ears and pods, leaving behind the stalks and unripe ears/pods to check again in a day or two. Then after all the ripe ears/pods are gone you can mulch the stalks.
- analog31 1y agoAs I understand it right now, the corn & beans are ready to harvest when the water content falls below a certain threshold, to minimize the cost of drying it. In my region, it's a betting game against the weather. If the right conditions emerge, everybody's trying to harvest everything at once. During this time there's also a crush for the available harvesters, semi trucks, and elevator capacity. All of which rides the ups and downs of prices. The robots could be programmed to manage this process too. Of course we'll need less of these crops, if we all become allergic to beef because of that tick. ;-)
- like_any_other 1y ago> Also, all of the crops have to be herbicide resistant to coexist with corn and beans. For now. There's already significant R&D on robotic versions of herbicide.
- whiplash451 1y ago> The two crops are corn and soybeans. Well, that's mostly because this was convenient for mass monoculture. We've killed crop diversity as a byproduct, but polyculture could open up opportunities to fix that.
- analog31 1y agoThe apex monocultures are beef, pork, and chicken.
- NalNezumi 1y agoI've toyed with this idea (nothing concrete) while working in robotics in Japan. During covid i traveled by bus through Shizuoka prefecture, through the mountains. The prefecture is known for its Wasabi plantation and indeed you could see many small plantations of it. It also grows in the wild in the mountains, usually where mineral rich water exist, along the water. Most of Japan is covered in inhospitable mountains (dense jungle like forest), and is therefore not even used for farming. Some patches of Wasabi plants looked so small, and very vertical (following along a natural stream) it must be gruesome work for a single farmer to go up and down that track. Set up like that could be an ideal application for robot farming. Conventional scale farming machines probably can't operate in this vertical constraints, filled with water, trees, rock and mud but small and nimble quadruped style robots could maybe! Fresh wasabi can go for like 250$/kg, seems like a case for small-scale, mountain farming (otherwise tedious for human, too unorganized environment for farming machine) with agile robots could pay off especially since the landscape can't otherwise be utilized (without flattening it). (the technology is not there yet I think. One can dream) Looks something like this: https://www.arabnews.jp/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/12/1608005820746711600-1024x683.jpg https://www.arabnews.jp/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/1... More at https://www.shizuoka-wasabi.jp/en/about/ https://www.shizuoka-wasabi.jp/en/about/
- cjbgkagh 1y agoThe future we’re already in should be characterized as cheap complexity. As an example, in manufacturing one offs were cost prohibitive, now it’s close enough to mass manufacturing cost that in many cases there is no point taking that extra step. Also people are increasingly concerned with food provenance, I would love to have a local automated greenhouse growing hairloom vegetables.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoThere aren't any combine models that sell more than a few thousand units per year. Individual parts in the combine benefit greatly from mass manufacturing, but the combines themselves don't really. Small harvester drones on the other hand could have a much larger sales volume, and really take advantage of mass manufacturing.
- bgnn 1y agoThis is a very good point, but what about the maintenance of managing multiple small harvesters vs one big one? Latter is riskier if fails but you don't need to deal with a fleet, so easier for the farmer.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoMaintenance would be a huge advantage for drone fleets, I would think. Harvest is often a ~2 week window. If your combine is down for a good chunk of that, you can get into real trouble. OTOH if one of your fleet goes down, just sideline it and deal with it during your other 50 weeks. And it can be dealt with by shipping back to factory rather than incredibly expensive field calls. As they say in IT: cattle, not pets.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoWhat kind of manufacturing one-off can you think of that comes within an order of magnitude of the cost of the output from even a cheap stamping press?
- SoftTalker 1y ago> combine harvester not requiring a driver Already pretty much the case. They may have a driver as a monitor/troubleshooter but for planting and harvesting it's all optimized down to the inch with GPS guidance steering the machinery.
- KaiserPro 1y agoSo long as someone hasn't nicked the fucking GPS...
- troupo 1y agoDon't many of these operate on local boundaries as well, not just GPS? (honest question, I only have a vague recollection of something like this)
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoI believe farmers can install local beacons which can supplement/replace GPS.
- pbmonster 1y agoCorrect, and doing that has become so trivial today, newer lawnmower robots come with it. I see the base stations everywhere across suburbia.
- KaiserPro 1y agoThat might exist, but rtk GPS is cheaper and needs less maintenance. https://www.farmads.co.uk/product/buqcr-27-06-2025-104659/ https://www.farmads.co.uk/product/buqcr-27-06-2025-104659/ its more that people nick those units (well used to, im not sure how nickable they are nowadays)
- KaiserPro 1y ago> The economy of the scale favors monoculture I mean it does, until it doesn't and you loose all your crops/soil/water. Monocultures degrade the soil, and you need to put more and more input in to make sure grow. Because there is no ground cover between crops, wind takes away your soil. If you mess up/mistime your pesticide/herbicide input, you'll loose all your crop. The more you grow, the more the soil turns to sand, requiring more fertiliser input, which mean more costs. If you take the yield per m2 of an allotment, and compare it to a really high quality agricultural field (ie Lincolnshire fens, or some prime land in the USA.) the allotment will have a much higher yield with less input. I don't have the figures on hand, but you'll need to turn to the bearded hippies at the henry doubleday to get precise numbers. If, through automation, you could have three or four crops in the same field, providing cover all year round. you could then start to keep your soil, because the wind cant get at it (crop dependant). you can grow sacrificial crops for pest control, meaning less pesticide input. This means more worm, which will stop flash flooding (more water permeability without ploughing) But all that requires high speed "pick and place" weeding/harvesting machines. Those are going to be complex and expensive until scale kicks in (think how complex tractors were, or threshing machines)
- atmavatar 1y ago> you loose all your crops/soil/water > you'll loose all your crop Is there a way to tighten your crops after they become loose or beforehand so they don't loosen in the first place?
- analog31 1y agoTwo of my friends who farm already have self driving planters and harvesters, controlled by GPS, that lay down different kinds of seeds and fertilizers depending on location within their fields. The farmer is there to fix things.
- euroderf 1y ago> The farmer is there to fix things. Including listening to elevator music while waiting interminably to get thru to John Deere customer support.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoThere is a solid equilibrium in a commercial monoculture and artisanal and subsidised polycultures for insurance. The transition will never be easy. But at least the groundwork is there.
- bgnn 1y agoIsn't monoculture farming heavily subsidized too? Either directly or indirectly.