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How much such automation is left to improve? There may still be room for technology proliferation, but at least for staples it may be about as automated as poss
by ctdonath 13y ago
How much such automation is left to improve? There may still be room for technology proliferation, but at least for staples it may be about as automated as possible: vegetables automatically picked, cut, frozen, bagged on the spot and shipped directly to retail stores; likewise for grains, milk, frozen meals... there's a bottom line cost to growing 2000 calories of food and shipping it N miles to the consumer, and that cost is NOT going to "approach zero". I dunno how far from that bottom line we are, but suspect we're well within an order of magnitude of it.
- AndrewKemendo 13y agoI agree that there is a massively high rate of automation already employed in the agricultural sector, however much like the difficulty of high speed internet is focused on the last mile, the last mile for food automation is in cooking and delivery in a palatable, healthy and convenient manner. To those ends, the logistics of food production are massively intensive and account for most of the food waste worldwide, so shrinking the logistics chain alone would significantly reduce costs and improve quality. I am thinking in this regard about the containerized growing systems that are starting to enter the market.