| " 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. |