[jlawson]

Big farm machines are dumb.

If we could instead build swarms of self-maintaining intelligent human-scale robots, perhaps working with genetically engineered work animals (monkeys?), they could hand-plant, hand-till, and hand-harvest crops at a far greater efficiency with far less disruption to the ecosystem.

Picture ten thousand dog-sized robots going individually planting and caring for and harvesting millions of plants in a big forest, or a field (with different plants shading each other). An individual dollop of manure on each plant. Weeds removed by "hand" without chemicals.

Basically an automated version of the extremely-efficient overlapping-crop style of farming that was often used in medieval Japan and other places with a lot of labor and know-how but without much flat land and without modern mechanization.

[TaylorAlexander]

Well I’m developing a dog sized robot platform that’s totally open source! It’s CC0.

https://youtu.be/cU_0M1_TvD0

[analog31]

I've read that in colonial times, people simply let pigs loose in the woods, then hunted them down later on when they were fattened up.

[geekagirl]

People still do that but it’s generally not a good idea for many reasons. Feral hogs destroy crops, are dangerous to people, and eat foods that native species rely on to survive. In colonial times, it made a lot of sense to do that, but not so much now.

https://mdc.mo.gov/wildlife/nuisance-problem-species/invasiv...

[lyime]

This won’t give you predictable yields. Though a combination of that idea and automation could work.

[misterprime]

Or just pay humans?

[fyfy18]

After Brexit I can only see practices like this increasing in the UK. A lot of the farm work is done by immigrants, because natives don't want to do the work. People aren't going to pay more for food, so the wages can't go up, meaning more 'efficient' farming practices will be used.

[ben_w]

While your examples and reasoning seems good, I don’t think it’s enough to support the conclusion.

From what I have seen, everyone who thinks there are any significant difficulties that need to be overcome is a Remainer and everyone who is a Leaver is absolutely certain that any claim of difficulty is “just project fear” — this, combined with the inherent time lag between planting and harvesting, means that what crops are around next year is entirely down to what UK farmers already believe will happen next year.

Four outcomes, for any given farm:

1. Current crops, easy access to labour: fine

2. Efficient crops, easy access to labour: fine

3. Efficient crops, no access to labour: fine

4. Current crops, no access to labour: bankruptcy

You may consider 4. to be an obvious safe bet, but when I say I think Leavers regard any talk of difficulty as total nonsense, I mean I get the impression they place it in the same mental bucket as “Satan is real and knows your online banking password”.

In outcome 4., the farms won’t be around afterwards to try it again the right way.

Given the UK is a net food importer, this is mostly separate to any question of food security, but ironically the lack of access to labour could increase unemployment.