131–140 of 279 posts
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Oh, I forgot a neat one: Drones with thermal imaging to prevent fawns to be killed by tractors.
Fawns , as in female deer? Is hitting them with tractors really a problem?
Can you imagine being I the cabin and witnessing that, how it probably sounds in the process?
Then cleaning up the mess and repairing the damage?
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How about harvest? Machines are quite specialized, how do you see that working out?
Bigger farms overall, which is anyway the trend so they utilize economies of scale. Or machine rentals if there is plenty of need from smaller farmers.
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Farming has always been innovative, except where an extreme abundance exists, like flood farming.
Thanks to modern capitalism, there's no such thing as a (localised) extreme abundance. Extremely fertile land will be bid up, until it's productivity per-dollar-value will be equivalent to other land. So we will always have incentives for innovation. (I specifically say 'localised', because on a global level we are living in extreme abundance by historic standards.)
Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do with, north of Canada has abundance of fresh water but it’s uneconomical to move it to California, etc.
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You could do that, the problem is the same as in making nitrogen fertilizer in a chemical plant: energy cost. It just takes so much energy to break the nitrogen tripple bond. Even if you made a plant that fixes nitrogen extremely efficiently, every joule of sunlight it pumps into the ground is not available as calories you harvest. And fixing nitrogen will take an amount of energy per acre on the order of what you ha…
Well, only being as efficient as existing nitrogen fixing plants (or rather their microbes) would already be quite interesting. Btw, I don't think plants are close to optimal efficiency in terms of using sunlight. See eg C3 vs C4 plants.
My point is that you can't have corn that is as nitrogen-fixing as a legume and still produce nearly as much corn - the plant (or its microbes) will need the majority of the available photosynthesis products to fix nitrogen. This directly makes the cobs smaller.
> Btw, I don't think plants are close to optimal efficiency in terms of using sunlight. See eg C3 vs C4 plants.
That's true, even photovoltaic panels (which are still far away from their theoretical maximal efficiency) are an order of magnitude more efficient at pulling energy from the sun than plants are. But significantly improving photosynthesis in crop plants is far beyond our current genetic engineering ability.
And I'm not aware of any way to organically fix nitrogen that uses energy outside what is provided by photosynthesis - or gets its energy from digesting dead organic matter, which also doesn't beat the limits of photosynthetic efficiency on a per-acre basis.
This is so great. My long term dream is that robotics take over farming, individually plucking each weed or weevil, and metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant, so that all the crops are organic. Most of the chemicals (yes, including nitrogen fertilizers) offset labor, so when the labor is free we shouldn’t need them. And people won’t have to spend their lives in stoop-back work or exposed t…
I disagree. I think we should have more human labor take over farming but on an individual level that's working much much closer to the consumption source. Think having your own farmer and food-producer in your own house or property, or perhaps shared with your small flock of neighbors. Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate step…
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> - A lot of data is collected for each cow and processed by an external company. This goes down to temperature measurements at each teat in the milking robot. The external company monitors each cow and plans individual treatment to prevent diseases and to optimize milk production. Very unfortunate for cows that they're able to produce milk for human consumption.
Now imagine how unfortunate it is to be a big, challenging game for human hunt... Compared to aurochs, the cows are thriving. (On a side note, I just saw a mounted skeleton of an aurochs yesterday, in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. That beast was huge , and it would look even more overwhelming to medieval or Iron Age people, who were on average shorter than us; I am 6 ft and that animal was as tall as me.…
This depends on the level of empathy you have for cows.
If you empathise with them as you would with humans, imagine making the same argument to justify slavery
One could argue industrial farms are fate worse than death
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Fawns , as in female deer? Is hitting them with tractors really a problem?
Fawns as in "deer children". When young, they lie down in fields a lot, and don't have the flight instict developed yet, so if they're in the field with the "parent" deer out getting food and the tractors / harvesters come by, it can be legitimately dangerous.
They specifically have the opposite instinct, because fawns usually lack coordination to flee like an adult. So they have the instinct to still.
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I disagree. I think we should have more human labor take over farming but on an individual level that's working much much closer to the consumption source. Think having your own farmer and food-producer in your own house or property, or perhaps shared with your small flock of neighbors. Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate step…
> Think having your own farmer and food-producer in your own house or property Impossible. The world is too urbanized, there simply is no space to do this for more than a few % of the population. > Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps [...] Maybe some problems can be solved, many more will be un solved. Reducing our trans…
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Their instinct is to stay put, which means they don't run when the tractor comes. A drone flies over the field, maps where the fawns are staying put, sends a message to automated tractors to reroute. This is probably the most "feel good" application of drones. That and detecting landmines.
That’s exactly the opposite of what thermal drones are use most of the other time
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I disagree. I think we should have more human labor take over farming but on an individual level that's working much much closer to the consumption source. Think having your own farmer and food-producer in your own house or property, or perhaps shared with your small flock of neighbors. Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate step…
> Think having your own farmer and food-producer in your own house or property Impossible. The world is too urbanized, there simply is no space to do this for more than a few % of the population. > Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps [...] Maybe some problems can be solved, many more will be un solved. Reducing our trans…
Your first criticism as an example. "World too urbanized". Again, the solution solves a big chunk of other problems we have. One need only read HN a bit to see a bunch of them. E.g. 1. Food islands. 2. Focus on transport to get food because mom and pop stores closed and we only have Walmart. 3. Car culture.
My point is don't shoot the idea down, we have to consider how working towards this arguable ideal moves the needle in a better direction. And yes, maybe the end-goal I presented isn't 100% possible or the right direction for society. But working towards it means we solve a host of intermediate problems, with each one making things a bit better.
Sorry I'm not answering all your points, which some are 100% valid and I agree, but others are just us talking past eachother. E.g. I'm not entirely advocating for us to go to the middle-ages and churn butter for 2 hours a day. But there has to be an in-between that opens up additional options and ideas that I can't possibly envision, or articulate well-enough, or consider every angle and potential criticism.