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The Age of Robot Farmers

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Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#61

Post by mikro2nd »

jmathai wrote: post #26

One of my favorite OSS projects is farmbot. I wish more people knew about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r0CiLBM1o8

Farmbot is a toy. A nice toy, to be sure, but a toy for rich urbanites who want a little veggie garden and it'll never be anything more than that. It goes nowhere near addressing the scale of real-world farming and I see no way it ever can. The concept won't even scale to small-scale market gardening -- the 1- to 10-hectare scale.

I'm not saying that farm-robotics in general can't work or scale -- it's a something I'm convinced stands a good chance of tackling the enormous fossil-fuel subsidy that factory farming is so dependent upon -- but the Farmbot thing... /stiffles a giggle/.

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#62

Post by imtringued »

ajmurmann wrote: post #32
thinkloop wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if they aren't picking, what are these people doing, and whats the wider cost? This idea needs to die so fast. It's an incredible psychosis that people fear the utopia that is automation. Imagine telling people 1000 years ago that everything around them will be done by robots, but that the people of the future would fight it. Psychologists are going to study this for generations. It's also pretty offensive. The onl…

It's obviously because of the way our economy is set up. One possible outcome of more automation could be higher standard of living while doing less work for everybody. Another possible outcome is a large part of the population being unemployed or underemployed, without health care and trouble to keep housing and even put food on the table, while a small portion of the population that owns the robots lives in luxury.…

I don't get it. You're saying the incompetent government's fiscal policy is unable to handle the growing inequality and therefore instead of fixing the government we should just ban robots? Seriously... Nowadays I think the biggest problem developed countries face is the opposition to progress because they are already happy with what they have and any improvement becomes an "us vs them" scenario where the new thing is demonized.

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#63

Post by roel_v »

l_camacho84 wrote: post #52

Every time I read about farm mechanization I remember the Ralph Borsodi work on the book "The Distribution Age". Every efficiency you gain in production scale you tend to lose in distribution efficiency. The key to sustainable farming is a decentralized small scale. This is the only way to keep transportation, marketing and preservation of the goods low.

Those costs are tiny, compared to all other costs. 'Local' is not a goal in itself (except for geopolitical reasons, but that's another topic). For fun, try to do the back-of-a-napkin math on how many bananas you can fit in a container, how many containers fit on a ship, and what percentage of the retail price that makes. Or how much it costs to ship a truck of lettuce heads from Spain to Northern Europe. Yes there are weird cases (flying roses from Eastern Africa to Europe?) but all in all, the costs are tiny.

The next thing then is, of course, that current costs externalize many hidden costs. Which is true, but look at efficiency gains of current gen freight ships, with sails made of solar panels and that sort of thing, and look at the economics of freight shipping - even at double the (shipping) cost, it would still be only a fraction of the retail cost.

Oh and marketing/sales costs for locally grown goods being low is straight up not true. Look at how hard it is for those small scale farmers to sell their wares, schlepping their old vans from farmers market to CSA collection point, and how much of their product goes to waste because of distribution inefficiencies...

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#65

Post by bluGill »

thinkloop wrote: post #29
brianpgordon wrote: post #10

> In 2011, for example, Georgia enacted a strict immigration law that targeted undocumented workers and their employers. Later that year, the state reportedly lost eleven thousand crop workers. To fill the gap, officials established a program whereby nonviolent offenders nearing the end of their prison terms could do paid farmwork. The program had few takers, and many prisoners and probationers who did try it walked…

> Georgia farmers lost more than a hundred and twenty million dollars > H-2A workers are still among the lowest paid in the country Why don't they pay labour $100M?

Farmers I know (in California) quit trying to find native workers when at $25/hour they still were not getting anyone to apply, even though that is double the $12/hr McDonalds in pays. That is before you factor in most native workers didn't show up for work regularly.

Immigrant workers see $15/hr as riches beyond belief: back home they get about half of that per DAY. To us it looks bad, but to them it is much better than their life before.

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#66

Post by pnutjam »

joe_the_user wrote: post #35
econ102fail wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That says something that people will rather go back to prison than work the job.

Well, the felons never stop being prisoners in the time they work. This tends to result in an unmotivated workforce no matter what the activity. No only this project but most prison labor projects fail.

I'm unable to locate a resource indicating the pay, only a blurb that says prisoners must pay for their transportation (I'm sure that isn't marked up or anything...) and the pay rate must be at least minimum wage.

I'm guessing pay rate is a big part of the prisoners lack of enthusiasm.

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#67

Post by pnutjam »

bluGill wrote: post #65
thinkloop wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Georgia farmers lost more than a hundred and twenty million dollars > H-2A workers are still among the lowest paid in the country Why don't they pay labour $100M?

Farmers I know (in California) quit trying to find native workers when at $25/hour they still were not getting anyone to apply, even though that is double the $12/hr McDonalds in pays. That is before you factor in most native workers didn't show up for work regularly. Immigrant workers see $15/hr as riches beyond belief: back home they get about half of that per DAY. To us it looks bad, but to them it is much better…

I'm not seeing any indication that wages ever reached $25 / hour. https://www.epi.org/blog/farmworker-wages-in-california-larg...

https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/

And the job requires at least an hour commute, with 12 hour days. That should require a premium. It's not full-time work.

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#68

Post by ajmurmann »

thinkloop wrote: post #37
ajmurmann wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously because of the way our economy is set up. One possible outcome of more automation could be higher standard of living while doing less work for everybody. Another possible outcome is a large part of the population being unemployed or underemployed, without health care and trouble to keep housing and even put food on the table, while a small portion of the population that owns the robots lives in luxury.…

Jobs are useless vestiges of the past. There is nothing honorable about jobs and no one cares about them. By their very definition they are things we don't want to do but have to for survival. This is all industrial work-centric brainwashing. If we can get survival without jobs that would be a great win for human kind. > Another possible outcome is a large part of the population being unemployed or underemployed, wit…

I'm totally with you. You were calling the mainstream reaction a "incredible psychosis", which it is not. It's rational on in individual level given the current economic system and general attitudes especially in the US.

If it was up to me we'd get UBI ASAP and as automation makes work more and more obsolete get closer and closer to communism. I think this also is desirable because it will allow us to follow our natural instincts and contribute to the commons rather than try to put them on our individual balance sheets at the expense of everyone else. (See this great discussion: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-thinkers-podcast/...)

Re: The Age of Robot Farmers

#70

Post by l_camacho84 »

roel_v wrote: post #63
l_camacho84 wrote: post #52

Every time I read about farm mechanization I remember the Ralph Borsodi work on the book "The Distribution Age". Every efficiency you gain in production scale you tend to lose in distribution efficiency. The key to sustainable farming is a decentralized small scale. This is the only way to keep transportation, marketing and preservation of the goods low.

Those costs are tiny, compared to all other costs. 'Local' is not a goal in itself (except for geopolitical reasons, but that's another topic). For fun, try to do the back-of-a-napkin math on how many bananas you can fit in a container, how many containers fit on a ship, and what percentage of the retail price that makes. Or how much it costs to ship a truck of lettuce heads from Spain to Northern Europe. Yes there a…

The costs are tiny because right now they not internalize pollution and social injustice. Yes, “local” is not an end on itself but the same is true for “global”. Right now the cost of sending a banana to the other side of the world in a container is small because we are jeopardizing the future of the planet by not putting a price on CO2 emissions. Local food need to spend effort on Marketing because they are more expensive that monocultures, and the reason for this is that monoculture prices benefit from subsidies and not paying externalities. We need to fix this for the sake of future generations and if we do this local goods would be much more competitive and so much more effective in marketing.
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