[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.