Similar logic applies to the case when we would use laser robots to get rid of weeds. It's artificial selection. Are you suggesting we should stop fighting weeds/insects to get better crops?
Those robots at least stop at the boundary of the field, unlike fertilizer and pesticides, that run off to the surrounding environment.
Such robots are mostly on a prototype stage, and not applied widely in agriculture today, so they are a possible problem of tomorrow rather than a present problem. Fertilizer run off is very much a present problem.
Also, the robots will typically replace a combination of herbicides and manual labor. It is not like farmers let the weed grow freely today. As such they may be an improvement over current practices.
Longer quote:
"Over the past 50 years ... Open-ocean oxygen-minimum zones (OMZs) have expanded by an area about the size of the European Union ... and the volume of water completely devoid of oxygen (anoxic) has more than quadrupled over the same period ...
"Agricultural production has greatly increased ..., resulting in a 10-fold increase in global fertilizer use over the same period (47). Nitrogen discharges from rivers to coastal waters increased by 43% in just 30 years from 1970 to 2000 (48), "
We should use far less land for growing crops. One of the primary means for accomplishing this is reducing meat consumption. Meat requires a lot of crops to feed livestock (+ a lot of water), while only contributing a small portion of the calories.
Less meat means less land for crops, which means less fertilizer use or fewer fields with laser robots ;).
Not really sure what you're hinting at, but yes using robots instead of herbicides would be a step forward. Robots can be programmed to not leak out into surrounding nature.
And actually yes maintaining a variety of weeds/bush around crops has been shown to be beneficial in certain circumstances: more insects attract more predators of all kinds and as such can create an ecosystem which lead to less plagues on the crops. Not gonna work for insanely large monocultures, but tossing away the idea is also not needed.
Those in combination with pesticides and insecticides are the main theat to diversity.
From the point of an ecosystem, those fields are desserts, cutting of different systems, so most species cannot travel and connect, which is something they need to.
> Robots can be programmed to not leak out into surrounding nature.
I don't think you can "program" a robot to avoid loosing micro-particles of its shell, or to prevent leaky/self-flammable batteries. Also i'm pretty sure the manufacture of the robot would incur processes that are much more devastating to the environment, eg. extracting and refining materials.
All in all, i agree with your point that chemical fertilizers and mechanized monocultures are slowly turning our soils into a desert, but i don't think "robots" are the future of many things.
Maybe some forms of eco-friendly robots can have a future in an eco-friendly society although i doubt it. But for that you'd need to build robots from widely-available and very recyclable materials, which is the opposite direction that the industry has taken by introducing over a hundred rare earths and metals in most electronics products.
Let's just say i have conflicted feelings about solarpunk: my gut tells me "cool" but my brain tells me "this is how we destroy nature". Although i do note some segments of the solarpunk community are more low-tech and would laugh at the idea of using robots for agriculture.
Heh, didn't know solarpunk was a thing. Anyway: materials etc are definitely a valid concern, but even in a worst case scenario I'm not sure a complete cost-benefit analysis would turn out negative for such robot. I looked around a bit (because robots in agriculture are a thing already) but couldn't find such numbers. But considering one robot could tackle many acres for many years (hopefully), compared with the kilograms of herbicides/pesticides used otherwise, it's just hard to guess which way the scale would tip.
It's hard to imagine what kind of evolutionary paths would be available to avoid robot weed killers? All I can think of is mimicking the crop that has been planted in the field.
Yes because there is no point in having huge yield now if the soil is dead in a few decades. We need to get over the "fighting" framing (i.e. short-term oversimplified industrial vision with 0 concern regarding sustainability).
Such robots are mostly on a prototype stage, and not applied widely in agriculture today, so they are a possible problem of tomorrow rather than a present problem. Fertilizer run off is very much a present problem.
Also, the robots will typically replace a combination of herbicides and manual labor. It is not like farmers let the weed grow freely today. As such they may be an improvement over current practices.