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"It's harder to find people to do that work every single year" Translation: The wages we pay are crap and we're not going to pay them more.
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If you raise the base cost of production in a low margin case like agriculture, then the price of the good must increase or they would be running at a loss.
Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life changing for farmers. But the market will always find the place where the work is unbearable and stop just shy of that.
You underestimate the percentage of the income some people spend on food. That's why agriculture is heavily subsidised.
This sounds like a much more efficient way to practice monocropping, enhance fragility, and capture economic value by increasing dependence on non-local food sources. In other news: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/pacific-northwest-s-...
That was my thought as well. Thanks for sharing the interesting article
So what is a more worthwhile use of high tech? Being someone in tech and having greatly economically benefited from it, I've recently been reframing what I know about software tech, startups, innovation with a regenerative paradigm. I am still making my way through Carol Sanford's work on regenerative paradigms and figuring out a lot of this stuff out. So far:
(1)
Christopher Alexander had introduced the idea of creating pattern languages for people living, working, and playing within building architecture so that they can modify and design their own living spaces. What we ended up with are cookie-cutter housing in suburbia. His work greatly influenced OOP and Human-Computer-Interface design (see his 1996 OOPSLA Keynote) ... and what we ended up with is the Gang of Four, Apple products, growth hacks, and "user engagement".
What we don't have are individuals, families, and communities having computer tech that can customized by the users for what works in their local environment. Smalltalk was designed with that intent in mind, but our legacy from Smalltalk is the Gang of Four and OOP "design patterns".
(2)
There was a recent article posted here. It was a fictional interview, the premise being someone from a parallel world where software design was elevated on par with science and art, and not merely engineering. They start with a "design brief" rather than engineering requirements. I lost track of that article.
Just some evolving thoughts.
This sounds like a much more efficient way to practice monocropping, enhance fragility, and capture economic value by increasing dependence on non-local food sources. In other news: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/pacific-northwest-s-...
Given where ML and CV are today, I'd bet on open source models trained on weeds within 3-5 years. This company can scale, but their unit price is going to plummet. Also, it sounds like they're using cameras, where it's concievable that other future sensors could be more efficient. An iteration of this with higher resolution cameras and small flying drones seems like an intuitive next step. This is a super interesting…
Agtech is a fascinating business.
Love seeing advances in this space. I have an 80 acre farm and I’m waiting for an autonomous slope mower. Question about this tech is, does it really kill weeds, or just defoliate them? Like, is this laser strong enough to get down to the roots, which are often very deep with weeds? If not, I’m wondering why lasers instead of something mechanical that can corkscrew down and tear up the entire root?
Pow! Take that, Monsanto! This diminishes farmers' dependence on patented "Roundup-ready" seeds, and on the Roundup herbicide itself. That can only be good for everybody except Monsanto.
I'm very surprised Monsanto isn't out there buying and slaughtering every such startup, for precisely this reason. You better believe they're trying _something_ to preserve their market, it's just more underhanded than that.
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I wonder why it can't it be done via location? Where we planted, vs where we did not plant.
This is the comment I came here for. I had a professor in college who was building self-driving tractors and would come in every other week complaining about John Deere this, or Case that, trying to steal his business with more expensive solutions. It turns out you can use GPS for a rough location and a fancy $200 gyroscope for millimeter precision. Then just plant the seeds on an exact grid and you know that anythin…
Lasers are not used because they’re expensive and dangerous. And Co2 lasers (as per the machine in the article) are powerful but super fragile.
Water shooting around at high pressure is in no way efficient or easy to handle.
Compressed light is the technology that’s actually going to be used for precision weeding. It has the speed, power and simplicity of lasers, without the cost and danger: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:67899797724715...
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That’s honestly a billion dollar idea. Or modify the stalks of those plants to be extremely bitter. Goats already love the taste of weeds and would select for them. Grazing animals would eat the weeds and naturally fertilizer the land. No harm if they don’t totally kill the weed, more food to fatten them up.
It's probably a cheaper idea too, well in terms of development costs. The trade off is that it'll take longer to prove out. Just get a farm and a good enough lab for goat/sheep/chinchilla/etc germ-line modification and prove it out over a few generations. Minus the salary and feed costs, it'll probably be less than the laser itself. Granted, that's just a billion dollar idea. The multi-billion dollar idea is, as you…