The rise of the robot farmer • Hacker News Board

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#111

Post by albertgoeswoof » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 9:55 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #94

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And includes sales tax

And you don’t have to tip the cashier

/s

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#112

Post by deialtrous » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

clarkmoody wrote: post #12

rmason wrote: post #9

In Michigan we've already got family farms with a man, two sons and a single employee handling 10,000 acres. Robots driving tractors, trucks and combines would allow that to expand 5-6X. In turn that would lead to a reduction in farmers of up to 80%. This is a trend that has been running for close to a hundred years. Remember at one time a quarter of America's population were farmers and now it's under 2%.

The immense productivity gains in agriculture have driven down food costs, which improves the standard of living of everyone. It also frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor in the economy.

Except most people don't do higher-valued labor, we mainly do completely pointless busy work either because someone somewhere thinks there is a chance they can extract a large amount of wealth from having that pointless busy work be done (every tech company on the planet) or because a government has taken money from everyone else and given it to people to do pointless busy work so we can say "unemployment is only X%". Nobody would pay the millions of useless bureaucrats if they had a choice, they only get paid because the government takes money from everyone else at gunpoint to give to those bureaucrats.

More to the point, I think you are incorrect about the standard of living impact. 150 years ago almost everyone could eat safe, healthy food. Now access to safe, healthy food is incredibly limited, in many cases impossible to obtain without growing/raising it yourself. We've traded our health and happiness for pointless gadgets, that's not an unambiguous improvement in standard of living. With the knowledge and technology we have now, families could easily provide 80+% of their own food with almost no work (and I mean what we have now, no need for robots of the future). Instead of having a tiny number of farm jobs providing massive amounts of garbage "food", we should have a huge number of tiny "farm jobs" producing good food in people's backyards.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#113

Post by deialtrous » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:06 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #103

anigbrowl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor But what if they don't want to? Yay for consumers but throwing people into economic limbo is a Bad Thing. That's like looking for the next record-breaking swimmer by randomly throwing kids into swimming pools.

Almost nobody who loses their job wants to. It's still a net win for the economy as a whole that people lose the jobs that are no longer worth doing.

The economy as a whole does not matter. It is not a person, it does not have any moral or ethical value. The only people who benefit from "the economy as a whole" growing are people who have positioned themselves as parasites who extract wealth from everyone like bankers. People want healthy, security and happiness. "The loss of your job, home, lifestyle, culture and heritage is irrelevant. Move to generic urban cell block #45725 and acquire a generic cubicle placement in order to procure generic toxic soyloaf to avoid starvation." does not produce health, security or happiness.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#114

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #106

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost nobody who loses their job wants to. It's still a net win for the economy as a whole that people lose the jobs that are no longer worth doing.

But pure capital allocation efficiency isn't a good indicator of social well being, just as infinite sugar sounds momentarily delightful until you think about diabetes.

That's kind of irrelevant to my comment, unless you consider workers part of the "capital" that is being allocated efficiently.

Even if you do, allocating capital (and workers) efficiently usually eventually leads to better social well being than allocating it inefficiently. (Perhaps reversing the inequality makes the historical examples more obvious: allocating capital and workers inefficiently leads to worse outcomes.)

But note well the word "eventually". There certainly is room for doing better at helping with the social well being of those dislocated by this process...

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#115

Post by deialtrous » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:18 PM UTC

otakucode wrote: post #79

nradov wrote: post #54

Earlier 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…

>but it is a significant time investment

No, it really isn't. Place organic matter on the ground in fall or early spring. When the last frost has passed, plant seeds through it onto the ground. To do grow enough for a family of four is not even one day of work for one person. During the summer and fall, pick food and eat it. That's it. A robot isn't going to save enough time to be worth it. Using your palm-top to tell your robot tended garden to pick 300 grams of lettuce for you and then going out and picking it up from the robot isn't noticeably faster than just picking the lettuce yourself.

>but the work in the 'vertical farming' market.

That is not a real market. It is just techno-dystopian sci-fi. It has no purpose, there are not enough benefits to offset the huge downsides.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#116

Post by ska » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:32 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #110

ska wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[...More diverse crops, less pesticides, less damage to soil, less energy use, mixed instead of mono cultures.] We already can do all of that, we don't need.. Question: If we can do all of that already, why isn't it being done (edit: assuming it isn't) ?

Its being done all over. The biggest ecologists were always farmers, who pay the first cost of soil erosion, soil damage and energy. They fail only on the mono-culture front, though its extremely common to mix crops in hilly ground but that's for erosion control. And now the potential to use less chemicals with robotic application is taking off even with large farm equipment. Cameras identify a plant off-row as the t…

Fair enough, I should have worded more carefully - it's an area I'm largely uninformed in and should have worded it more as a question; re-reading it sounds like an assertion so i added a tweak.

It makes sense to me that farmers are best placed to optimize for current outputs (and probably poorly placed to optimize outputs).

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#117

Post by deialtrous » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:43 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #108

deialtrous wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already can do all of that, we don't need robots. Most farms have been no till for years now, the idea that fields are plowed is an anachronism. This is more tech wankery, people with a particular technology trying to shoehorn it into being the "solution" to problems that are already solved easier and cheaper.

[...More diverse crops, less pesticides, less damage to soil, less energy use, mixed instead of mono cultures.] We already can do all of that, we don't need.. Question: If we can do all of that already, why isn't it being done (edit: assuming it isn't) ?

Small amounts of it are being done, most farms have been no till for years for example, cover crops are the norm now instead of some weird fringe thing, stuff like that. It is not done to a greater extent for two reasons. One is because it is a business and the primary (often sole) concern is making money, so anything that isn't the normal way of doing things is avoided. There are serious financial incentives to not try anything better. In order to actually get a pay out on your crop insurance if your crop fails, you have to have followed all the "approved practices" to the letter. So if it says "spray your potatoes with fungicide every 5 days" and you can't prove that you did, you lose a few hundred thousand dollars this year. This sort of thing makes it hard to change even if you want to.

Second, there's active intent to prevent people from knowing how to do things better. Almost all agricultural inputs are produced by a small number of large corporations. If farmers knew they could cut their fertilizer to 10% of what they buy now, stop buying pesticides, and spend less on fuel those corporations would lose a lot of business. So they pay "agronomists" and "soil scientists" to mislead farmers and keep them on the treadmill. There's lots of very deliberate FUD about organic agriculture, permaculture, etc, and when you've got millions of dollars invested in land and equipment, a little doubt goes a long way.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#118

Post by leggomylibro » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:44 PM UTC

rmason wrote: post #9

In Michigan we've already got family farms with a man, two sons and a single employee handling 10,000 acres. Robots driving tractors, trucks and combines would allow that to expand 5-6X. In turn that would lead to a reduction in farmers of up to 80%. This is a trend that has been running for close to a hundred years. Remember at one time a quarter of America's population were farmers and now it's under 2%.

Do you know of any farms like that which do tours, or areas where there are a lot of people operating like that?

Modern agricultural technology sounds fascinating.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#119

Post by deialtrous » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:53 PM UTC

pwaivers wrote: post #5

> “I expected farmers to be quite luddite about the adoption of new technology,” he [Ben Scott-Robinson] says, as he packs Rachel away. I actually assume farmers are very welcoming of technology. They are hard workers and good business men. Usually technology makes them more efficient and more money.

Technology generally does not make them more money. Often technology gets forced on them whether they like it or not because some other farmers adopt it, lowering their costs and thus lowering the price of the already tiny margin crops being produced so they make the same as what they did before. They just get a small one time bump in income before the market adjusts to the new price. And now every farmer has to adopt it just to keep making the same amount of money they were making before, or in some cases to make less than they did before but if they didn't adopt it they would lose money.

Also, the idea of the hard working farmer is totally antiquated in developed countries. Almost all farms are huge monoculture cash croppers. The farmers sit in self-driving tractors looking at porn on their phones all day for a few weeks per year.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#120

Post by Pfhreak » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:57 PM UTC

leggomylibro wrote: post #118

rmason wrote: post #9

In Michigan we've already got family farms with a man, two sons and a single employee handling 10,000 acres. Robots driving tractors, trucks and combines would allow that to expand 5-6X. In turn that would lead to a reduction in farmers of up to 80%. This is a trend that has been running for close to a hundred years. Remember at one time a quarter of America's population were farmers and now it's under 2%.

Do you know of any farms like that which do tours, or areas where there are a lot of people operating like that? Modern agricultural technology sounds fascinating.

Lots of them do. It sounds like you may live in an urban area. Check out your local farmer's market for a local farm organization. (In Seattle, we have one called Tilth Alliance.) They may publish a guide to all the local farms in your area, and many farmers will respond positively to, "Hey, I'd like to learn about what you do!"

Alternatively, look around your state/province for what agricultural products they produce. In Washington, for example, there are distinct farming areas for wheat, apples, cattle, etc. Go visit those small towns, post up in a coffee shop or local bar and ask the people there. Most small town folk don't mind showing around a few polite strangers from time to time (in my experience.)