What if it turns out that "take care of this land" means the traditional way California was taken care of with regular small slow burns. After over 10k years of this type of management there are many important native species that won't even germinate without the presence of ash.
Or it could turn out to look like satayoma (Japanese peasant forests) or it could be more similar to the crop rotation that was traditionally practiced in many parts of Central Africa where roots were important.
In Russia before the Soviets forced "modern scientific agriculture" on peasants to modernize, they practiced things like contour farming (where they interplanted rows of crops against the contours of the land to slow water down) and maslins (where they intermixed multiple varieties of wheat and barleys in the same patch). Now contour farming are an active area of research for their ability to prevent topsoil loss and build soil health while maslins provide superior yield stability and use little to no pesticides.
That's not even getting into the over 40-120,000 varieties of rice we've documented. Most of which are hyper adapted to a very specific location—often even a single village.
My point is there is no one way to take care of a plot of land. It's all relative to a number of factors beyond just the abiotic characteristics of the land itself. Your goals and intentions matter and you will always find localized unique adaptations.
Your point isn't contrary to LLMs or LLM-powered robotics. LLMs have access to the entire human corpus, including documented regional specializations, as you describe. The LLM knows via sensors where it is and what local conditions are. The LLM could even hypothetically conduct experiments to try to find further hyper-local specializations, instead of just relying on monocrop agriculture.
It all depends on the agent harness and the system prompts.
Are you saying that has failed? It isn't obvious to me from that page that anything in particular is going wrong. I don't think anyone is daft enough to claim that AI solves the "Iowa remains unplantable due to winter conditions" problem.
logs suggest it's been 'critically failing' and 'blocked for 68 days' on farmhand introduction, although the logs don't go back far enough (and cut off too early) to really tell what's going on. https://proofofcorn.com/log
That's kind of the opposite problem -- the agent doesn't have robot arms or legs or a parcel of land. It has to rely on people to get access to land and plant and harvest the corn, and those people are ignoring it.
Or it could turn out to look like satayoma (Japanese peasant forests) or it could be more similar to the crop rotation that was traditionally practiced in many parts of Central Africa where roots were important.
In Russia before the Soviets forced "modern scientific agriculture" on peasants to modernize, they practiced things like contour farming (where they interplanted rows of crops against the contours of the land to slow water down) and maslins (where they intermixed multiple varieties of wheat and barleys in the same patch). Now contour farming are an active area of research for their ability to prevent topsoil loss and build soil health while maslins provide superior yield stability and use little to no pesticides.
That's not even getting into the over 40-120,000 varieties of rice we've documented. Most of which are hyper adapted to a very specific location—often even a single village.
My point is there is no one way to take care of a plot of land. It's all relative to a number of factors beyond just the abiotic characteristics of the land itself. Your goals and intentions matter and you will always find localized unique adaptations.