[yenwel]

Nice project indeed, been following it for some time. I grew up on a farm, have agricultural and IT degrees and also worked in automation in farming, factories, cities and warehouses. This project focusses on a technological solution to societal, economical and agronomical problems. You could try to make a cheap robot that does traditional farming like tillage, fertilizer and pesticide spraying, irrigation on a monoculture. Or you could design your farm with permaculture and foodforest principles which makes it like a self sustaining ecosystem that reduces a resource usage of water, labour, nutrients, pest control etc. Society leads people into bullshit desk jobs where they have to spend their free time in the gym to not become morbidly obese. I think society could benefit if people could enjoy at least part time doing manual labour growing food instead.

[nrclark]

What kind of per-acre yield do you get with the methods you described above? Can they feed our population? Do the same methods work in coastal California and Indiana?

[yenwel]

Well this does go back to traditional high yield techniques like terra preta which besides making superfertile soil has the added benefit of being a carbon capture and soil preservation solution or the three sisters system where you get yields from three crops on one field and even get nitrogen capture from legumes. What does high yield mean in the short term when you are destroying your most valuable resource. Even if you have high yield one dimension, how efficient is this when you have multiple inputs and outputs and you end up in a pareto efficient situation. The highest yielding farms do not necessarily have the best scale efficiency. Permaculture and food forest systems can have very high yields if designed correctly. California is losing thousands of acres of land to salinization because of bad irrigation practices. Permaculture means to improve and protect to soil and increase water retention with the help of carbon content in the soil. I'm not from the US so I would'nt know about Indiana.

[hgomersall]

There was a paper recently showing that small scale allotments have higher yield then conventional farming. The suggesting is that it was the high labour approach, including high crop diversity that increased the yield. It's this sort of thing that robots can do: run large farms like small scale allotments, with all the environmental benefits that would bring.

[yenwel]

My parents had a highly computerized feeding system on our farm. In the summers I worked student jobs in highly technological green houses picking tomatoes and pig slaughter houses besides the work on the farm. I've grown some form of scepticism from experience of the high degree of automation in food production systems from a consumer or operator side. Do mind I work in automation but it needs to bring more value than just playing with toys. Permaculture systems are designed to reduce or optimize usage of all resources also labor. You set up an ecosystem where pests are kept under controle by other organisms instead of relying chemical or mechanical controls. This is even more puritanical than classic organic farming where you rely on natural pesticides. I am from Belgium where we have the belgium blue white cow which is very highly yielding in meat because of a genetic mutation but you are very dependent on vets for giving birth via caesarians because of the high degree of muscularity. There is a trend towards other races like limousin for meat production. In biological systems theory of constraint applies very much were you are very dependent on limiting factors like micronutrients, vitamins or in this case microchips. Humans and hamsters are both the only animals that can't produce vitamin C which makes fresh fruit a limiting factor for us or we get scurvy. The reliance on natural gas for nitrogen fertilizer via the born haber proces is already a handicap in a polarizing world. Imagine being reliant for operation of your food production system on a geopolitical hotbed like Taiwanese computerchips. I do think technology can also help with the design of robust food systems. I know the food forest institute in Belgium has a course on using drones for surveyance.

[krmboya]

Are you able to recommend some resources to get started with permaculture. I'm also in 'tech' but I've recently been developing an interest in 'living off the land' and would like to have my feet in both areas going into the future.

[yenwel]

I learned about permaculture from books in my native language (eg Louis De jager from food forest institute in Belgium). I'm no expert though. I did find docu like "The Biggest Little Farm" very inspirational.

[krmboya]

Thank you. I'll check them out for more information