[subtenante]

Agriculture in our age must shift from productivity first to sustainability first, because we are running out of fossil energy allowing to produce most of the fertilizers, and we have already killed our soil with it. A farm involving a lot of machines (i.e. a lot of need for energy) might not be the way to go in order to keep the agricultural system stable. The most you ask from the soil, the poorer it gets, and then you have to dump fertilizer to keep some level productivity.

We have created flawed models of what was good for productivity. I work with a guy very invested in research on olive growing (here in the south of France), he's achieving results believed to be impossible by many agricultural researchers. His method is entirely organic, shifted towards correct use of pollination, cross breeding and a lot of care, the kind of which automated sensors remain lacking of. From what he told me, he's able to develop the root system of an olive tree ~4 times as fast as researchers using what is believed to be optimal conditions.

We already have excellent robots able to take care of farms, they're called humans. Farming is a very noble activity and instead of less farmers, we need more, with more time to study the impact of pollinizers on their crops, how to deal with the new pollinizers they'll get due to climate change, etc. All of which can't be done unless we re-humanize farm work.

[return0]

> Instead of less farmers, we need more

That's bad for the economy and productivity, and for the environment in the end because more farmers with smaller land are squeezing for gains. It's especially a problem in in the EU where agriculture is heavily regulated and EU-subsidized. Take a look at the countries with the largest agricultural population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_countries_by_employme...

And all this while keeping in mind that the common agricultural policy in the EU keeps the prices high for european producers.

[rm_-rf_slash]

But if you follow the parent's argument, food prices are artificially low because they don't factor in fossil fuel limits/emissions as well as other effects of soil depletion.

One big problem in America that we haven't even begun to fully address is the Ogallala Aquifer's rapid depletion. Without it we will need truly massive infrastructure investments to maintain one of the world's biggest breadbaskets.

So maybe more farmers would be bad for the economy now, but eventually we are gonna have to pay the bill for all the quick and dirty growth we've built our society on, which means things could be much, much worse for our parents or grandchildren.

[iheartmemcache]

Oh god. This times a million. Big Agra is just slamming in N-P-K 10/10/10 and using center-pivot irrigation[0] during peak sunshine hours because hey, the water table's only 15 meters down! Then to stay competitive average farmers have to beat their land just as hard.

Here's a guy who runs a mini-vineyard in CA who saved almost half a million gallons of water in one season for his grapes using pretty trivial means[1]. I bet if he incorporated some recent 'best/alternative' practices he could get that significantly lower too.

The good news is universities (particularly Australian unis[2]) have conducted pretty thorough analysis w/r/t efficient watering for healthy plant root systems. You have lay new sub-surface irrigation drip system with textile enclosures[3] which is an initial expenditure, but you end up saving a boatload of money on water in the long run. (Drip irrigation[5] in general is alright, but you have tons of water loss via gravity[4] as shown here.) "Permaculture"[6] is a DIY-sociological movement of farming by 'efficient/sustainable/whatever' means.

The bad news is the last time the US had a radical shift in farming was when farmers beat their land so hard we ended up having the Dust Bowl. Conditions had to get so bad that you'd get 'dust days' like 'snow days' from school/work for people to change their farming habits. It wasn't until FDR appointed Henry Wallace(unsung national hero) as Secretary of Agriculture that things started to change. If I could buy futures in water 50 years from now, I'd put my entire savings in it. The botanists and horticulture scientists have made massive advances since the 1930s. We can sustainably farm on land every season if you don't plant corn every dang season and then pump nitrogen in there to make up for the lack of nutrients.

Grey water[7] can very easily be treated and reintroduced into your local garden. We can even use refuse from septic tanks, treat it on-site and re-introduce into your your lawn/garden to produce 100% safe edibles (subject to your local regulations; also, if you're on any sort of medication such as antibiotics, you don't want to introduce that into your ecosystem). No land? No problem. You still can save water. Get a dual-flush toilet[8] which uses half the amount of water to dispose of urine.

I'm not a 'save the earth' kind of guy. The planet was here long before humans and will still be around regardless of all disasters we can possibly throw at it; that's a certainty. Will your grand-children have congenital defects from rampant pollutants, poor air quality, and tainted water is the real question. (I'll end this on a good note - the good news is reforestation can be done in a generation or two![9])

--

[0] http://www.lindsay.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/0/6ab577c195d6...

[1] http://hackaday.com/2015/12/11/vinduino-full-irrigation-with...

[2] http://www.unisa.edu.au/Research/CWMR/Students-and-researche... - These guys are doing some interesting work. Most of the Aussie unis are actually. U of Kansas is doing some great work too.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_textile_irrigation - They mention PE and PP but there are alternative materials available which aren't hydrocarbon based

[4] http://www.intechopen.com/source/html/45153/media/image4.png... Effects vary on type of soil (and subsequent density that determines the rate at which gravity pulls water away from the root system), the micro-culture that exists, how water-hungry your plant is, and a boatload of other factors...

[5] http://www.sswm.info/category/implementation-tools/water-use...

[6] https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/diy-instructions/how-to-bu... Water rights will vary from state to state, especially in the Mountain/Pacific zones. It gets as extreme as "you're not allowed to collect rain-water on the land you own, sorry" which is insane because such legislation doesn't even apply to oil/gas/minerals. If you hold full title to an estate (i.e., you didn't just purchase surface rights, or a split claim) and you find diamonds on it, you are issued full rights to it.

[7] "Greywater Reuse" - Amit Gross, ‎Adi Maimon, ‎Yuval Alfiya, 2015

[8] https://www.amazon.com/K-3987-0-Wellworth-Two-Piece-Round-Fr...

[9] https://www.ted.com/talks/shubhendu_sharma_how_to_grow_a_for... I hate TED talks, but this former Toyota salaryman learned about biodiversity from some 80 year old Japanese guru, applied the Toyota manufacturing techniques to make the system efficient, and is doing some amazing work with basically no funding behind him.

[leakybit]

Where do you think all the water from your septic tank goes? Right back into the water table, and back up your well pump to drink again.

[chadgeidel]

You are correct, except aquifers like the Ogallala don't replenish in years or even decades. It takes millennia.

[hueving]

I don't see any justification though for why humans need to do the labor. This guy found a nice pollination technique. Great, teach it to the robots or spend time teaching the robots how to analyze different techniques for effectiveness.

Humans are not great at farming, that's why we have entire industries producing tools to help them do better. It's silly to think that riding around in a tractor all day is a better long term solution than checking up on a robot doing it.

[Loic]

The reality is that you are not going to feed a town with a tractor or a robot acting as a tractor. This is because with your robot, you are producing cereals. If you want to feed the town, you need fruits and vegetables.

Now, if you want high density, sustainable fruits and vegetables production, you need to pay extremely attention to your soil. Practically it means, try to never walk on it and produce multiple species on the same area to use the different patterns of root networks, shadow and cross protection effects.

If you do that, you end up being highly productive on a small surface but it is also very hard to see opportunities in using robots. Take a look at a very smart people running a small farm[0], he is relentless in using and building the right tools to save work and improve output etc.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Market-Gardener-Successful-Handbook-S...

[lawless123]

People can survive on cereals.

[CuriouslyC]

And primitive hunter-gatherer people tend to be taller, more intelligent and healthier than primitive agricultural people.

[roryisok]

not cereals alone, and not if they destroy the soil in a few generations

[hluska]

Agriculture used to be the dominant industry in my part of Canada, and I have relatives/many friends who either farmed or currently farm. Consequently, I was once extremely interested in agtech.

I ran into a couple of problems. One big problem is that farming is not a particularly good business to get into right now. Equipment costs are very high, inputs are constant, and the global market is only kind to those producers who produce at massive scale. The days of taking over your Dad's quarter section and feeding your family ended before I was born. Now, if you want to take over the family farm, you more likely than not have a full-time job in the nearest community...

Because of the economic crunch, it has created a demographic issue. Many of the farmers I spoke to are in their 70s and 80s. They are mainly retired, but keep working the land to keep it away from corporate farms. Farming is more of a hobby at this point, and they choose to do it the way they always did.

The young farmers who would be early adopters hesitate because they more often than not rely upon their parents and grandparents during seeding and harvest. And, they can never rely upon a profit big enough to even pay the cost of automation.

Edit - It occurs to me that the phrase 'quarter section' has little meaning to anyone outside of agrarian communities. A section is usually one square mile. In Canada, in the late 1800s/early 1900s, the government granted one quarter section to any family that showed they could work the land. The Dominion Land Grant fuelled immigration. Many families still own their original quarter section and are fiercely protective of it.

[CuriouslyC]

The only way you can even come close to automating farming is through massive conventional monoculture systems. These systems destroy the soil and sacrifice genetic diversity to achieve this goal while producing a glut of a single crop that ultimately drives the value of that crop into the ground.

Humans are incredibly efficient - our pattern recognition ability on a per watt basis is way beyond what we can do with machines. Not to mention we handle environmental irregularities far better than most robots, and we have far more task flexibility. We have millions of years of evolution behind us to make us efficient foragers, it is silly to think we're going to beat that with a few hundred years of science behind us. Instead, we need to figure out how we can make agriculture an enjoyable career instead of soul crushing toil.

[rojobuffalo]

The justification is that we're in an artificial and unsustainable situation at present. Just 8 generations ago, over 90% of the labor force was farming. We're at 1% now. We came up with some incredible engineering practices to achieve this but we lost sight of sustainability in the process. It's the most fundamental good in the economy after water and before shelter. It's reasonable that more than 1 in 100 people should be involved in producing food.

[sebleon]

This comment is spot on. There's good reason to believe that the low-hanging fruits in improving agriculture are non-tech changes in farming. For example, a province in India was able to improve rice yields by 45% by transplanting seedlings earlier in a grid pattern [1].

I doubt that eliminating human labor costs would move the needle, automating farms seems like a low ROI move.

If you follow the money, it's easy to see why the US has focused its research on high-tech petrochemical fertilizer farming and GMOs. You can sell proprietary fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and seeds, but it's much harder to monetize new farming techniques.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/feb/16/i...

[lambdadmitry]

> If you follow the money, it's easy to see why the US has focused its research on high-tech petrochemical fertilizer farming and GMOs. You can sell proprietary fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and seeds, but it's much harder to monetize new farming techniques.

I believe this means that you are not aware of the work of Norman Borlaug [1] [2]. Basically the very fact that we don't have famines now in places like India, Pakistan and Mexico is due to his and his group's work on intensive agriculture, which was mostly about farming techniques, government practices and setting up local fertilizer productions.

Moreover, it seems that you somehow look down to fertilizers. There is nothing wrong or inherently "non-green" in fixing nitrogen into nitrate fertilizers, you can easily do this with solar energy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

[sebleon]

Right, I've heard the Western narrative on Norman Borlaug and the "Green Revolution".

I'd highly encourage you to read through the work of Vandana Shiva. [1] She'll provide a well-researched, critical view as an actual stakeholder in India's food system.

I look down upon petro-chemical fertilizers because of their disastrous effects on the environment and food security. Happy to elaborate, but Dr. Shiva work does it better.

[1] http://vandanashiva.com/?p=291

[lambdadmitry]

You keep throwing the phrase "petro-chemical fertilizers" around but I can't see how it can make sense except for denigrating the concept and spreading FUD (which is counterproductive). Ammonia is just NH3 and there is nothing "petro" (i.e. hydrocarbons) in it, that hydrogen can be obtained anywhere and the nitrogen is literally around you.

Can you please elaborate on how fixing nitrogen on industrial scale is "disastrous"? What difference do you see between bio-available nitrogen that originated in root nodules and chemical reactor?

[sebleon]

> You keep throwing the phrase "petro-chemical fertilizers"...

Given that most fertilizers are composed of chemicals derived from petroleum, it's accurate. I don't use the term "conventional farming" because these techniques are extremely modern.

> Can you please elaborate on how fixing nitrogen on industrial scale is "disastrous"

To be clear, fixing nitrogen is fine, bacteria do this already naturally. The problem with fertilizers used at the industrial scale is that they end up ruining local water supplies + killing local ecosystem of bacteria and insects [1]. After a few years of using industrial fertilizers, famers end up ruining their soil and end up being dependent on fertilizer suppliers for future crops.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-fertilizers-h...

[lambdadmitry]

> most fertilizers are composed of chemicals derived from petroleum

Can you please elaborate further? Yep, in a lot of cases hydrogen for ammonia comes from natural gas. Nope, it doesn't have to be, in fact you can easily get it from water. What other "chemicals" do you have in mind?

> because these techniques are extremely modern

They are, but the concept of "not dying of famine" is also pretty modern if you consider an overall population.

> The problem with fertilizers… killing local ecosystem of bacteria and insects

I believe you confuse fertilizers with pesticides.

[chadgeidel]

I just listened to a podcast (50 things that made the modern economy http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04f77rg) about the Haber-Bosch process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

According to the podcast and the wiki page, the current source of hydrogen for ammonia is natural gas. Additionally the process is energy-intensive, using high temperature and pressure.

These things don't necessarily make it mandatory that it's petro-chemical, but due to the way we currently run it it is.

[lambdadmitry]

And the current source of electricity that runs HN is most probably fossil fuels. Does it make HN "petro-website"? It's clearly a derogatory term that serves no constructive purpose. I believe we should strive for zero-emission hydrogen production (which is clearly possible given that hydrogen can be easily used to utilize excessive production from "green" sources) instead of pushing luddite worldview.

[hueving]

>I doubt that eliminating human labor costs would move the needle, automating farms seems like a low ROI move

If that were true, the farms in California wouldn't be filled with illegal immigrants.

[sebleon]

Ah, looks like you're right:

USDA: "Wages, salaries, and contract labor expenses represent roughly 17 percent of total variable farm costs, and as much as 40 percent of costs in labor intensive crops such as fruits, vegetables, and nursery products." [1]

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/back...

[Quarrelsome]

I feel like you're not answering the question and instead subverting it to discuss your own philosophy. As legit as it is I don't see how this is helpful to the person asking the question.

[subtenante]

I am trying to provide context regarding the whole problem. Besides, the guy I talked about uses heavy technology whenever he can (he needs special equipment to take macro pictures of bugs, he needs social interaction with other people in local vicinity spotting larvae of a pest, he needs way to statistically test land lots, he needs ways to measure sun exposition and time, etc.) ; the last thing he needs is robots doing his job though.

And every question is as loaded with philosophy as any of its answers. :)

[snowpanda]

>I am trying to provide context regarding the whole problem.

You're mistaking context as an opportunity to share your personal views and beliefs. OP asked very specific questions. Your view on renewable energy isn't part of those questions.

[beat]

Sometimes, people asking questions are actually asking the wrong questions. This is often true. So responding to the question with a better question to consider is a perfectly valid answer.

In my experience, if I don't know the answer, it's usually because I don't understand the question.

[sebleon]

He's pointing out flaws underlying the question. Definitely relevant.

[lambdadmitry]

The most important fertilizer is some form of ammonia (bioavailable nitrogen) and you can't "run out" of nitrogen really, not on this planet. Energy requirements of fixing nitrogen are high, but the process is quite robust to fluctuating power supply, so you can easily use "green" energy to do this. So in the end you either let bacteria do this (e.g. in legumes' root nodules with questionable energy efficiency) or you do this on industrial scale, using solar energy to efficiently fix nitrogen and introducing it manually to the soil. It should not be a question of "what's natural" or what feels better, rather it's a question of energy efficiency and reasoning from first principles.

[MistahKoala]

> Agriculture in our age must shift from productivity first to sustainability first

But the two are not mutually exclusive; productivity has a role to play in reducing the footprint of agricultural activity. I don't see it as a dichotomy of 'different OR less', but 'different AND less'. I don't think we should make the mistake of inferring that productivity necessarily means greater and unsustainable use of energy and natural resources.

[runeks]

Only in this age of low interest rates does high productivity equal unsustainable use of resources, as the price of anything with a yield (like arable land) becomes prohibitively high for a farmer to have grazing cattle, such that buying a huge barn and putting the cattle in there is at least half the cost (that's what's reflected by the supermarket prices I see, at least). This changes as the rate of interest rises.

With a falling rate of interest, it becomes increasingly cheaper to borrow capital to buy machinery and build barns, and put live animals in these, while any asset with a yield -- such as farm land, or bonds -- is increasing in price.

With a rising rate of interest it's the opposite. Borrowing money to rent machinery and build industrial real estate becomes increasingly expensive, but the price of land will be falling, as there's less and less reason to purchase farm land, in order to earn a yield, when the short term rate of interest is rising (basically risk-free profit).

[DavidWanjiru]

Is these a way to get in touch with this person, follow their work, read their research, etc.?

[abledon]

Do you have a link to this olive farm you speak of? Like a facebook page or something?

[aaron695]

Sorry, but I think this is nonsense.

Robots are incredible more efficient and energy saving than humans.

Do you really thing a human would use less energy driving a car/tractor than a robot?

Robots never lose attention, are very easy to measure their performance and are incredibly accurate.

And I'm not sure why humans would use less fertilizer/pesticides than robots?

If you have a system that works better, then tell the robot and it will do it.

Or are we tilling by hand and introducing all the work place deaths this introduces? Farmers die at a high rate, I don't think it's that noble in it's old form.

[CuriouslyC]

For simple, monotonous tasks, robots are indeed far superior to humans.

For more complex tasks that involve flexibility and high level pattern recognition, humans as so far above robots on a work/watt basis it is silly. We have been developed by millions of years of evolution as efficient foragers.

Of course, if you take the complexity and pattern recognition out of farming you make it amenable to machines. An unfortunate side effect of this is that the farming practice becomes unsustainable.

[beat]

Robots can do repetitive tasks in tightly constrained conditions faster and more accurately than a human. But anything that involves incomplete/inaccurate data, wildly varying conditions, and most importantly, decision making is best left to humans.

That's why computers run code, and humans write code.