I’m co-founder of the “space bots with lasers” company. Happy to answer any questions.
Who are your investors?
The rise of the robot farmer
91–100 of 187 posts
Re: The rise of the robot farmer
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unlike what you would expect, small robots do more damage to the soil not less. Damage to soil is not linear with mass, A massive robot will do twice as much damage where it touches the ground (wheel tracks most likely, but there are other choices), but it will touch 10 times less ground to do the same work so the total averaged over all the land is much better. For the same reason, tracks generally end up doing more…
This seems a bit confusing - in the context of agriculture, when I hear "damage to the soil", then that implies (to me) that we're talking about the difference between the long-term soil erosion caused by plowing/tilling/cultivation versus growing different cultures for which the process requires less of such invasive activities and so doesn't erode the soil as much. The effect of large tires vs small tires vs tracks…
While I agree overall, soil compaction is something that large farms are starting to watch because it makes a measurable difference.
Re: The rise of the robot farmer
#93I’m co-founder of the “space bots with lasers” company. Happy to answer any questions.
once again op doesnt deliver
Re: The rise of the robot farmer
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory. In practice, this has lead to collapse of rural economies, rampant poverty, and epidemic drug usage amongst rural populations. As to driving food costs down, that's trivially disprovable. Loaf of bread in 1950: 12 cents. Adjusted for inflation that's $1.26 currently. A cheap loaf of white bread costs substantially more than $1.26. Edit: of course this gets downvoted, because econ gibberish is certainly mor…
A cheap loaf of white bread costs substantially more than $1.26. Actually that's about exactly what it costs at Walmart. I wanna say it's $1.28 but I'm not 100% sure. Granted that's literally the cheapest loaf of bread you can buy not an average nothing special loaf of bread.
I know this isn't the point of this sub thread, but in UKthe prices are:
The cheapest loaf of bread I can buy is 36pence or $0.47
A 250 g pack of butter is £1.45 or $1.88
A 450 g jar of thin cut orange marmalade is 49p or $0.64
This is from Lidl.
Re: The rise of the robot farmer
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing stopping you from planting a garden today. It's not a huge amount of work, and any robots that become available in the next few years will only marginally reduce that labor.
It's not a huge amount of work, but it is a significant time investment. I'm thinking more of a nearly-sealed box that is entirely automated, a family could purchase for a couple thousand dollars, and then it produces food for a few years. It's not so much robots in the sense of things which drive around the landscape that will improve that sort of things, but the work in the 'vertical farming' market. Isolated syste…
Vertical farming is not an economical method of producing useful quantities of food. The people pursuing it appear to be motivated by utopian idealism and inaccurate cost estimates.
Any future "farm in a box" is going to require about as much labor as a garden does today. Someone has to clean the filters, wipe off the mold, plug the leaks, replace the corroded parts, etc. Those activities won't be practical to automate in our lifetimes.
Re: The rise of the robot farmer
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you link machines to bondage? If you look at slavery from Sparta to the American South it's often had a large component of agricultural labor. Even things like serfdom where the serfs were nominally free but tied to working the land it they were doing agricultural work.
You're not wrong. But, human history goes back roughly 200,000 years. Slavery can only be dated back to 1860 BCE. One could argue that the "bondage curve" -- if there is one -- is parabolic. I.E. human bondage peeked sometime during the Atlantic Slave Trade and has been going down ever since. One could also argue that -- before modern machinery -- humans existed for nearly 200,000 years with no documented form of bon…
Your arguments seem misleading - the existence of anatomically modern humans goes back roughly 200,000 years, but human history, i.e. the era with documented evidence starts with widespread writing that comes much, much later; first samples of writing is from ~5000 BC, but they're sparse enough to not be informative about social practices.
The very first documented law codes (2100–2050 BCE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu ) already mention slavery. We can't know how long slavery existed before that, since those are literally prehistoric times and archeological evidence is not sufficient to determine these relationships, however, as the current evidence shows that slavery existed for as long as we have documented form of anything, there's absolutely no reason to assume that for the 200,000 years slavery didn't exist and good reason to assume that it did exist for at least part (or even all) of that undocumented time, as in the absence of any other evidence it would be prudent to assume that civilization at 10,000 BC had similar practices as it did in 2000 BC instead of being significantly different for no good reason from all other documented human history - we have no historical evidence at all of a time in early human history without slavery.
Re: The rise of the robot farmer
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
'a lot of them' means exactly nothing. How many? Do you have some numbers? Last time I checked, the dept of labor was saying that about 40% of all agricultural workers are illegal immigrants and United Fresh Produce Association between 50 and 70 percent. So yeah, a lot of them don't use 'legit' systems. It must be very hard to cheer for building 'the wall' while employing illegals and getting federal subsidies. That'…
I don't understand what the relief would be. replacing non-american workers with machines does nothing to help American workers
Two differences — and I’m not saying they’re “good” or “bad” because I refuse to claim I understand economics well enough — is that money flowing to undocumented workers is likely to be untaxed and money flowing to foreign citizens who neither live locally nor spend much locally will have some sort of impact on inflation, as there will be less currency circulating within the nation doing the employing.
Re: The rise of the robot farmer
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not wrong. But, human history goes back roughly 200,000 years. Slavery can only be dated back to 1860 BCE. One could argue that the "bondage curve" -- if there is one -- is parabolic. I.E. human bondage peeked sometime during the Atlantic Slave Trade and has been going down ever since. One could also argue that -- before modern machinery -- humans existed for nearly 200,000 years with no documented form of bon…
Your arguments seem misleading - the existence of anatomically modern humans goes back roughly 200,000 years, but human history , i.e. the era with documented evidence starts with widespread writing that comes much, much later; first samples of writing is from ~5000 BC, but they're sparse enough to not be informative about social practices. The very first documented law codes (2100–2050 BCE https://en.wikipedia.org/w…
What part of those laws that didn't pertain to agriculture (failing to plant/harvest) were about the penalty for raping somebody else's slave. So many measures of grain etc.
Re: The rise of the robot farmer
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
'a lot of them' means exactly nothing. How many? Do you have some numbers? Last time I checked, the dept of labor was saying that about 40% of all agricultural workers are illegal immigrants and United Fresh Produce Association between 50 and 70 percent. So yeah, a lot of them don't use 'legit' systems. It must be very hard to cheer for building 'the wall' while employing illegals and getting federal subsidies. That'…
I don't understand what the relief would be. replacing non-american workers with machines does nothing to help American workers
Correct, it helps the farms remain profitable. My wife is a winemaker and even with the guest worker program they are not able to find enough workers. The salaries have gone above $20/hr, though the way overtime works is different and requires a lot more than 40 hours of work (for now). Don't have the time to put together a well referenced document, but the inability to hire workers at what I feel is above the value of the work is a real problem.
Re: The rise of the robot farmer
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory. In practice, this has lead to collapse of rural economies, rampant poverty, and epidemic drug usage amongst rural populations. As to driving food costs down, that's trivially disprovable. Loaf of bread in 1950: 12 cents. Adjusted for inflation that's $1.26 currently. A cheap loaf of white bread costs substantially more than $1.26. Edit: of course this gets downvoted, because econ gibberish is certainly mor…
First, my local stop n shop sells a loaf of white bread for $1.29 and that's not even a sale price. Second the average income has gone up by more than inflation as well so you would expect the cost of staples to go up accordingly.
So you prove knieveltech correct, the price of bread has not gone down despite whatever productivity advances may have come about since then.