361–369 of 369 posts
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Just imagine all the packaging material that would be required to get everyone a new farm bot every few years.
The thing about growing food locally, is that you don't need individually package your apples in plastic. You just harvest it, then eat it, in it's healthiest possible form, while also not doing insane polluting.
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> The other person understood me just fine, and also noticed how obvious my statement was, and how you avoided it. Of a sample size of two that's a 50% failure rate. You stated an us vs them, i pointed out that drawing an us vs them assumes that us and them are different. That you apparently meant something different is odd to me, but you do you. > Oh it absolutely does. The other person understood it perfectly. Agai…
> Of a sample size Well, actually it's extremely obvious there you aren't actually attempting to understand my argument. The other person noticed it as well. Notice, how instead of going on about this, you could have instead gone back to my message and actually tried to figure out what my argument was. But you didn't. Because you aren't interested in understanding what my argument was. > that a 50% failure rate Oh yo…
A single line explaining how "people vs nature" doesn't imply that people and nature are different things would have cleared this up easily but instead we get multiple instances of you saying "it's so obvious I'm not going to explain it"
However, you have full confidence that everything is cleared up, so i guess it must be.
I'll see myself out.
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May I ask why you used there's instead of there are? There is likely sounds wrong and is wrong and I see it very often
Its written the way it'd be spoken, which seems fine for informal writing
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> Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us. Wow we have completely different world views. I think nature is perfect and it's us who have gone too far away from it to notice and hence we are far from perfection as well. Ideally we should not be comparing us to nature since we are part of it. But somewhere deep down we know we are not aligned with it so we end up comparing it to humans which seems pret…
I'm sincerely fascinated by your perspective. I haven't heard this viewpoint before. Why do you think nature is perfect? I.e. what is your "gold standard" against which you measure? Something that immediately comes to mind for me is all the death and suffering that is abundant through nature. If the only thing that matters is propagation of life, then nature does seem pretty good at it, but as a being that operates s…
What if this is the best it can do with all the things that can go wrong or are going wrong. Perfection does not mean things will never go wrong. They can and they will. I can give you example of process that is near perfection: photosynthesis. Nature can store energy and then utilize it without creating adverse effect on other life. This is just one example but there are many processes like this.
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Isn't it better to mist plants, especially if you can't delay watering due to full sun? IIUC that's what big box gardening centers do; with fixed retractable hoses for misting and watering. A robot could make and refill clay irrigation Ollas with or without microsprinkler inlets and level sensing with backscatter RF, but do Ollas scale? Why have a moving part there at all? Could just modulate spec valves to high and…
There is a shift underway from ubiquitous tilling to lower and no till options. Tilling solves certain problems in a field - for a while - but causes others, and is relatively expensive. Buried lines do not coexist with tilling. We are coming to understand a bit more about root biology and the ecosystem of topsoil and it seems like the 20th century approach may have been a highly optimized technique of using a sledge…
No-Till Farming > Adoption across the world : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming#Adoption_acros... :
> * By 2023, farmland with strict no-tillage principles comprise roughly 30% of the cropland in the U.S.*
The new model used to score fuel lifecycle emissions is the Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy use in Technologies (GREET) model: https://www.energy.gov/eere/greet :
> GREET is a tool that assesses a range of life cycle energy, emissions, and environmental impact challenges and that can be used to guide decision-making, research and development, and regulations related to transportation and the energy sector.
> * For any given energy and vehicle system, GREET can calculate:*
> - Total energy consumption (non-renewable and renewable)
> - Fossil fuel energy use (petroleum, natural gas, coal)
> - Greenhouse gas emissions
> - Air pollutant emissions
> - Water consumption
FWIU you have to plant cover crops to receive the new US ethanol / biofuel subsidies.
From "Some Groups Pan SAF Rules for Farmers Groups Criticize Cover Crop Requirement for Sustainable Aviation Fuel Modeling" (2024) https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/news/business-input... :
> Some biofuel groups were encouraged the guidance would recognize climate-smart farm practices for the first time in ethanol or biodiesel's carbon intensity score. Others said the guidance hurts them because their producers have a hard time growing cover crops and carbon scoring shouldn't be limited to a few specific farming practices. Environmental groups said there isn't enough hard science to prove the benefit of those farm practices.
I have "The Living Soil Handbook" by Jessie Frost (in KY) here, and page 1 "Introduction" reads:
> 1. Disturb the soil as little as possible.
> 2. Keep the soil covered as much as possible.
> 3. Keep the soil planted as much as possible.
FWIU tilling results in oxidation and sterilization due to UV-C radiation and ozone; tilling turns soil to dirt; and dry dirt doesn't fix nitrogen or CO2 or host mycorhizzae which help plants absorb nutrients.
Bunds with no irrigation to not till over appear to win in many climates. Maybe bunds, agrivoltaics, and agricultural robots can help undo soil depletion.
"Vikings razed the forests. Can Iceland regrow them?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40361034
https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/# ctrl-f soil , no-till / notill / no till / #NoTill
As a farmer, this looks like it would be massively expensive per acre and massively wasteful of environmental resources. I currently farm 5,000 acres including 400 irrigated acres for $300,000 per year. I grow enough food to feed thousands of people a year.
You would need 200 of these systems to farm one acre. I could not find a list price on the website, but based on my knowledge of CNC machine pricing, each machine probably costs in the neighborhood of $10,000. So this machine would cost $2,000,000 per acre to farm. Insanity.
Government bureaucrats want you to starve to death, so I am sure money will go to this and be taken from ordinary farmers.
The system also appears to be an environmental disaster... Enormous amounts of heavily machined aluminum, stainless steel, and plastic to do tiny bits of work already done far more efficiently in other ways.