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Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

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Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#11

Post by rmason »

The fully automated farm is a few years off. Here in Michigan large families with one or two employees farm 5-10,000 acres.

With good Iowa or Illinois farmland you can expect 200 bushels of corn per acre or 60 bushels of soybeans. This land by the way will cost you approximately $7,183 per acre.

If you're interested in this topic you might consider attending the precision ag conference, the next one will be in 2018

http://www.precisionagvision.com/

Or your vegan community could move to downtown Detroit. Cheap fixer upper houses going for $1,000 with plenty of inexpensive land nearby. City brings the water right to you and with drip irrigation you can water your crop inexpensively. Lots of restaurants that want your produce and the largest farmers market in the country. http://www.easternmarket.com/

Lots of inexpensive, though untrained, help for minimum wage. Wide lightly travelled city streets and they just rewired the entire city with LED streetlights. Five million people live in the greater Detroit metropolitan area. You will have be proactive on crime, lots of web cams would be a wise investment. It wouldn't hurt to be armed, in fact the police chief recommends it! But without risks there wouldn't be the immense opportunities.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#13

Post by randomdata »

rmason wrote: post #11

The fully automated farm is a few years off. Here in Michigan large families with one or two employees farm 5-10,000 acres. With good Iowa or Illinois farmland you can expect 200 bushels of corn per acre or 60 bushels of soybeans. This land by the way will cost you approximately $7,183 per acre. If you're interested in this topic you might consider attending the precision ag conference, the next one will be in 2018 h…

> This land by the way will cost you approximately $7,183 per acre.

That's surprisingly cheap. A farm near me, with similar production capabilities, recently sold for $25,000/acre. Around here, you won't find anything really worth farming for much under $15,000/acre on the low end these days.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#14

Post by ydrol »

There was a great BBC doc a few years ago (2009) called "A Farm for the Future". It was about someone from a traditional farming family discovering/researching/interviewing around permaculture. In one of the interviews she mentions that traditionally she can feed 5 people an acre, whilst the interviewee was claiming 10+. I believe permaculture has come along in leaps and bounds since, so it is well worth reading up on.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#15

Post by randomdata »

> Do we have any technology (independent of cost) existing today to have a fully automated farm?

From a grain farmer's perspective, the modern equipment you get nowadays is practically fully automated already. However, that's the fun part of the job! While I do get excited about the automation, I am also in no huge rush to take away the human touch completely. After all, I farm because I want to be out in the field.

But keep in mind that the field work is also just a small part of the farm operation. Much of the work happens back in the office. I don't see that being automated any time soon, at least no more than any other business could be completely automated.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#16

Post by rmason »

randomdata wrote: post #13
rmason wrote: post #11

The fully automated farm is a few years off. Here in Michigan large families with one or two employees farm 5-10,000 acres. With good Iowa or Illinois farmland you can expect 200 bushels of corn per acre or 60 bushels of soybeans. This land by the way will cost you approximately $7,183 per acre. If you're interested in this topic you might consider attending the precision ag conference, the next one will be in 2018 h…

> This land by the way will cost you approximately $7,183 per acre. That's surprisingly cheap. A farm near me, with similar production capabilities, recently sold for $25,000/acre. Around here, you won't find anything really worth farming for much under $15,000/acre on the low end these days.

That's an average price of Iowa farmland statewide. But as you know there's a wide variety. I have no problem believing the price of $10,000 to $15,000 per acre for the premier land.

However as you probably are aware sometimes competition among neighbors boosts those prices into the stratosphere.

Then there's Detroit where you can buy city lots for $50. Assuming an average size of 50 by 100 ft or 5000 sq feet that is $435 an acre and it comes with water!

http://auctions.buildingdetroit.org/sidelots

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#17

Post by randomdata »

rmason wrote: post #16
randomdata wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This land by the way will cost you approximately $7,183 per acre. That's surprisingly cheap. A farm near me, with similar production capabilities, recently sold for $25,000/acre. Around here, you won't find anything really worth farming for much under $15,000/acre on the low end these days.

That's an average price of Iowa farmland statewide. But as you know there's a wide variety. I have no problem believing the price of $10,000 to $15,000 per acre for the premier land. However as you probably are aware sometimes competition among neighbors boosts those prices into the stratosphere. Then there's Detroit where you can buy city lots for $50. Assuming an average size of 50 by 100 ft or 5000 sq feet that is…

Average land price is similar here, but you won't be producing anywhere near 200bu of corn or 60bu of soys on that average land. Maybe 2/3s of that, if you get really lucky, but more like half in a more typical case for average and below. So, I still maintain that it is quite cheap.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#18

Post by makeapoint »

Regarding your second question, you imply that it would be easier to automate the vegetable production than to automate livestock production. In fact, current dairy farms are in many ways more automated than crop farms.

Modern dairy farms feed, milk, vaccinate, etc. automatically--without any human intervention. The automated systems alert humans if an animal does not show up for food after some threshhold of time. Otherwise, it can even supply custom rations per animal, detect various ailments, track weight gain, monitor milk quality all by itself.

For the more general gist of your question--complete self-sufficiency on a single acre, that is more problematic to automate. Industrial farmers already automate a lot. They have automated machinery to re-level fields, plow fields, plant fields, and harvest fields, and irrigate. but those systems are largely practical only for large parcels. They operate on fields of, for example, 40 acres. And they are sufficiently expensive as to require many hundreds of acres to justify their cost. Also, they tend to be single purpose. They can only harvest corn, or only wheat. Planting a variety of crops within an acre would require a variety of automated tools. Think how different your equipment would have to be to harvest carrots as compared to barley.

I don't mean to say that it can't be done. But it would take a lot of work from where we are now.

Incidentally, your seedstock.com link is not impressive because it is "advanced." It's most impressive feature is its size. Hydroponic greenhouses tend to be more labor intensive (but have higher yields), although you could put the same attention into earth-grown crops if you chose.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#19

Post by martinza »

randomdata wrote: post #13
rmason wrote: post #11

The fully automated farm is a few years off. Here in Michigan large families with one or two employees farm 5-10,000 acres. With good Iowa or Illinois farmland you can expect 200 bushels of corn per acre or 60 bushels of soybeans. This land by the way will cost you approximately $7,183 per acre. If you're interested in this topic you might consider attending the precision ag conference, the next one will be in 2018 h…

> This land by the way will cost you approximately $7,183 per acre. That's surprisingly cheap. A farm near me, with similar production capabilities, recently sold for $25,000/acre. Around here, you won't find anything really worth farming for much under $15,000/acre on the low end these days.

Where do you live? Prime land in California? Average acre in America is $4000 [1], so wouldn't call $7183 an acre cheap.

1: http://www.agweb.com/mobile/land/farmland-value-guide/

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#20

Post by randomdata »

na85 wrote: post #6

>an entire one acre farm The way you wrote this reads as if you consider one acre to be a very large tract of land. I have family that farm and I can tell you that one acre is actually quite petite as farms go. The average size of a farm in North America is something like 400 acres.

One of the farms I run has a small 2.5 acre section of the main farm divided by a ditch. If that chunk were much smaller, I'm not sure it would be even worth pulling the equipment into it. If it were any smaller, some of these large implements you can buy nowadays wouldn't even fit.

But perhaps what he means is that with more automation, the new tools would make utilizing small pieces of land up to 1 acre more attractive. I'm not so sure, but there's always the idea thrown around of automation allowing equipment to get smaller (and large operations would buy many of them).

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