Japanese firm to open world’s first robot-run farm

You don't need the night cycle at all for the vegetation stage, just flowering, so run these suckers 24/7 and you get more crops, more often.

Everyone thinks about food in terms of economic costs. Few people consider the time that's involved. Yes, yes, yes, food is already cheap, but it isn't free because of the time humans spend involved in its production.

Imagine removing humans from the food equation. Production (vertical farms), harvesting (automation), distribution (electric vehicles), clean energy inputs (geothermal, solar, fusion), and maintenance (growing crops that can be used to manufacture replacement parts [e.g., organic polymers and carbon-based electronics] combined with modular robotics) needs to be addressed. Difficult, but not insurmountable.

Once food is actually free (not merely inexpensive), how will it affect the economy? A large part of our economy is based on trading work (indentured servitude!) for food. Such trades probably predate agriculture.

Hunger, humanity’s everlasting, unrelenting stressor is timeless and impelling. Hunger calls us all to consume, to feed corporate machines. Machines that were forged in the flames of the Industrial Revolution, when rich men hammered out schemes for our future. Their plans, perhaps unwittingly, followed the template of slave-driven civilisations wrought throughout the ages. Caste societies wherewithin the wealthy commanded the masses through control of food and knowledge.

The printing press and, on a larger scale, the Internet liberated our minds. Wholly automated, indoor farming has the potential to liberate how we spend our time.

In 1974, Henry Kissinger (a national security operative of the U.S. government) once proposed rationing food in developing nations to restrict population growth. Starve people today to prevent people from starving tomorrow. How brilliant. Decades later, researchers learned that empowering women to make educated decisions about their own wombs reduces birth rates. Imagine that. Kissinger was shown to be wrong, but it took time to discover the flaws in his logic, the errors in his proposal.

With the pressures of work, family life, and other societal impacts, time is the most precious of commodities. What if the majority of the world didn't have to work for food, but, instead, could invest their time dedicated to something they love? (Yes, there are people who have the opportunity to love their work, but I assure you, when compared with the global population, they are an insignificant minority.)

I wouldn't call it "critical" like that. If robot farming became impossible for some reason, and old farmers started dying of old age in large numbers, and if there really were a shortage of farmers or farm laborers, then those who really needed their services would offer a higher wage, raising the price until some young people took it. Assuming Japan has a functioning market economy.

I wonder where this claim came from? (not sure how serious the concern you're talking about is, but let's run with it) Who benefits from persuading concerned authorities to push more young people towards farming? How about farm owners, who would have to offer higher wages to a less-competitive job pool? I wonder if they found it cheaper to just tell interviewers that the sky was falling?

Whenever you hear someone claiming an urgent economic "crisis", be suspicious. Very suspicious. With a moderately healthy market, often this just means someone will have to pay higher prices--which, as far as they're concerned, is an outrage, a scandal, and an emergency.

Edit: Googled around to figure out what stories you might have read. And, let's see:

"... Japan Agriculture (JA). With its tight links to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the agriculture ministry, and employing an astonishing 240,000 staff in Tokyo and around the country, the JA is probably Japan’s most powerful lobby. It campaigns to keep high import tariffs on farm goods: the tariff on rice is 777.7%, that on butter is 360%, while sugar attracts a 328% levy." http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21576154-fewer-bigger-plo...

"Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, has promised to protect “sacred cows” — including rice, beef and dairy — from the deal. Rice carries an almost spiritual significance here, not to mention a 778 percent tariff." https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japans-farmers-face-an-...

Hahahaha, welp. Right, then, maybe you don't have a functioning market economy. That sounds to me like the real problem. I know my recommended solution. Hmm, I find it cool that I "called" that one. It's also kind of interesting to see what these Western publications are doing, and how far it leans towards uncritically swallowing the crisis story.

The Economist one is focusing on the TPP, and it is mostly critical of the JA. The Washington Post one--I give them credit for mentioning the important facts, but they exhibit no sense of their proper weight or their meaning. The article is titled "Japan’s farmers face an existential crisis", the first time they mention the agricultural lobby is in the 7th paragraph, and generally it seems like "Oh, gee, things just are that way" amid a sea of distracting details: portraits of individual farmers, their history and aging concerns, oh and by the way it takes a combined effort from the local and federal governments to "experiment" with "reform" of a few farms because they're so heavily intertwined that the government insulates them from market competition with a 4x-8x trade barrier and who knows what else, and also here's what this proud farmer has to say about his profession. Eeh. Just strikes me as bizarre.

You can stack fields so you grow 20X the amount per square meter/foot/whatever than you would with sunlight. True there are vertical solutions that use mirrors but these become unwieldy to design and maintain (cleaning the dust off the mirrors etc) so it's simpler to just go with the led shelf solution.

Adding to that, this allows you to grow vast amounts of food in urban environments meaning that it is a cheaper/shorter journey from field to table. Logistics is a major expense in farming and a huge harm factor in relation to our environment.

Also rich desert nations that normally depend on food imports, like Saudi Arabia. Solar PV + being able to grow food with minimal water waste is sure to make sense.