[theraido]

This is a nice accomplishment, a step forward. But to some extends it's a step forward in a backwards system. It's a bit like the 'if cannibals start eating with forks, is it progress'-question.

Agriculture has become a industry of scale, but that might be it's undoing. It might be better to have an electric tractor doing the ploughing, but wouldn't it be even better to do less ploughing? With the invention of fertilizers (which isn't bad in itself) we where able to scale, but we needed more fertilizer, the soil became more barren and devoid of soil life with every iteration.

With heavier tractors we needed to lower the water level to not get stuck in the soft soils, the heavier tractors compacted the soils even more, so we needed heavier tractors to till en plough the soil again. Otherwise we couldn't force the same crop out of the soil year after year.

When we're only looking at the economic outcomes of the agronomic industry, we're forgetting a few things. I work in IT, I work at an environmental NGO, I have an interest in agroecology, organic farming and such but I often feel it's an 'either/or' kind of thing.

It's either locally sourced, community supported agriculture with a huge focus on soil restoration, resilience, crop rotation, diversity (polyculture? as opposite of monoculture) land access which attracts a specific crowd of people. Think leftist, anarchistic, community-oriented, spiritual-religious (which group I really like) but with a lot of menial/manual labor, a aversion of technology. Which can be explained by the centralistic nature of a lot of technology, and it often being focused on ‘vertical scaling’.

Or it’s hip startups with sensor tech, drones, AI-platforms predicting where you’ll have te best results and use for example ‘variable-rate seeding’ and program your fleet of heavy tractors to automate it all. We’ve automated quite a lot in ‘beef production’, but maybe we should do less of that and focus more on finding solutions to scale horizontally? (Like we might need less humongous farms producing one specific product but more smaller farms producing various products).

Hopefully this makes sense to someone ;)

[goodcanadian]

Minimum till and zero till agriculture is already a thing. There is still a great need for tractors. Having grown up on a farm, I continually see people with an idea of agriculture that is massively out of date. Technology and techniques advance as they do in any industry. It's not perfect, and some farms are better than others, but farmers are continually striving to improve both for economic and for environmental reasons.

[hutzlibu]

" Think leftist, anarchistic, community-oriented, spiritual-religious (which group I really like) but with a lot of menial/manual labor, a aversion of technology"

I've seen quite some of that community supported agriculture.

Basically, machines were invented and put to work for a reason. Farming a field used to be backbreaking and still is, if you work a big field. Most of the communities I've been, struggle a lot with even a small vegetable garden.

In other words: big words, but low outcome, with the result of having to buy the food in the end.

"Like we might need less humongous farms producing one specific product but more smaller farms producing various products"

So I agree on that, but also on a smaller, diverse farm, I would use at least a small tractor.

But here I see the advantage of autonomous electric tractors: they could be made quite small and rather have more of them.

But I would really not go back to horse or human drawn wheat harvesting. It is not efficient. Those who like to do so as a hobby, have plenty of opportunity, but don't expect to feed the world with this approach.

[Siira]

(Just a reminder that scaling is very important. A lot of people have problems procuring food, probably most people, actually. Solutions that work for rich people are just skipping the problem entirely.)