Automation is seen in the more advanced countries, ones which lack an oppressed underclass like the US. There's much more automation on farms. Robotic milking is widely used in Australia, but less popular in the US. [1] New Zealand has the best automated slaughterhouse technology.[2] Those jobs are mostly done by illegal immigrants in the US, and the companies hiring them are screaming about stricter ICE enforcement.[3][4]
This is secondhand and not firsthand knowledge, but one thing I've heard from a number of agtech founders (and sometimes farmers when we do diligence calls with them) is that hiring employees is very hard because of seasonality. E.g. you might need 100 workers most of the year, but 400 for a few weeks when it's picking season. And of course if you are in an area known for a single crop, all of the other local farms have the same seasonal labor need.
For these types of businesses, paying less for labor is a secondary goal and just having enough labor (human or machine) is the primary goal.
Rural Australia also just has a desirability problem. Rural towns regularly offer significantly above market rate for GPs and teachers, but rarely ever fill the posts.
Offshore oil rigs beg to differ. For almost any set of circumstances, there’s a salary that will entice people to fill the role. They just don’t want to shell out the mid six figure salary that would be required. It’s only a “breakdown” because we collectively feel entitled to have people fill the role but don’t want to actually pay what it costs.
Offshore oil rigs deal in billions of dollars worth of hydrocarbons per day. The revenues make it feasible to offer high salaries and still generate massive returns. Many rural locations just aren't economically productive to justify the kinds of salaries necessary to draw people to them.
If we take for granted that "farm requires farmers, farmers require doctor", then the doctor should charge whatever market rate is for someone to work there, and the farmers should be paying that, drawing that from salary from the farm business, and that should be priced into the cost of the farm business's output?
Why can't the farms increase prices to support a basic quality-of-life for those living there?
I don't disagree there's some breakdown of the market here, but I'm not sure that saying "well there's not enough money coming in to the area" isn't stopping a step short.
I think farmers don't set their own prices, (there's nuance, but not really). They haul to middlemen who pay what they pay. Sometimes they even sell to transport companies / truckers that buy it to haul it to middlemen, both of whom pay what they can pay.
In that setting, the "regional" middlemen have the power to set prices, not the farmers, so a distant farmer from a poor community has no leverage over what teachers are paid in their community.
Generally speaking, I think almost all locally-produced, distributed industries work this way, by aggregating many producers the middleman has a ton of power to set prices, but of course is subject to the prices set by the next tier up, all the way to the commodities exchange, from what I can tell.
Anyway, this "averaging over a large area" ruins local economic efficiency.
There is always a price. At the right price, someone will go to teach in a war zone. This is not a hypothetical either, Libya has expats from the West to this day.
> Or there are some locations where markets just breakdown because the environmental factors overwhelm whatever salaries you offer.
There's literally no such thing - I wanna see an example!
The given scenario is not an example, because you can simply raise the offering until people take you up on it!
I mean, you can ask people to work in high-risk life-threatening environments and people will take you up on that offer IFFF the offer is high enough!
Want someone to work on a seabed? In an oil rig away from home for 9/12 months? In arctic conditions away from home for 3 years at a time? That's all happening right now.
Hell, you could put out an advertisement for volunteers on a one-way trip to Mars and you'll still get those positions filled!
If you cannot get teachers to move to a rural area, you are doing something wrong.[1]
[1] Where I am right now, I'll take that offer given a good enough salary and long enough contract. Many older teachers, maybe 10 years from retirement, will happily sell up and semi-retire to teach a few more years renting in a rural area before actual retirement. If they aren't doing it, it's because the offer is too low.
Yes but the point of the poster is the framing of the conversation.
There is no labour shortage, there is a salary shortage. And we, as the collective global community of serfs and plebes must realize this, and call it for what it is.
There is currently a massive teacher shortage in Ireland, with something like >1800 unfilled posts and we're approaching the new school term. There is no teacher shortage, there is however an abundance of catholic-church-controlled schools with overly restrictive hiring policy, with many newly qualified teachers not really interested in becoming involved in religious things. Teachers are paid well here, but clearly not well enough for many of them to be willing to subject themselves to draconic requirements such as needing to provide catholic teachings to kids taking fucking math.
Agriculture is bottom of the barrel business because no political power worth its weight allows price gouging. Food has to be kept as cheap as possible because otherwise the economy doesn't work. The workaround for this is subsidies, but those don't scale. You can't agriculture your way into Google Ads, the money printing machine.
Could you elaborate on "subsidies don't scale"? In the US, farm subsidies are a huge chunk of our budget and, to the best of my understanding, help keep food prices low. I'm not informed enough to know if it's an inefficient solution though.
that is incorrect. 2023 US Payments to agriculture [1] were $10.972 billion. That is 0.04% of GDP or ~0.697% of the federal budget[2] for 2023. It spiked slightly in 2020, but has been a small portion of the budget for a long time.
I guess it's a matter of perspective, I know 0.7% isn't the biggest item in the budget but it's a fairly large line item to my mind. Either way I still wonder what the "does not scale" comment meant.
Edit: re-reading my comment, I regret my word choice, "a huge chunk" is obviously incorrect.
First of all, 11 billion is 0.17% of the federal budget. (Which is ~6 trillion). You were looking at a quarterly budget, not the annual one.
Secondly, that 0.17% that is spent on food security has dramatically better ROI than the 1.7% of it that is spent on, to pick a random line item... maintaining 5 (of 11) carrier strike groups[1].
---
[1] For contrast, the entire rest of the world put together has exactly 2 carrier strike groups. Somehow, I'd have to prioritize people getting three meals a day over nearly anything else the government could be doing.
I'm a regular Joe on the internet, with a regular job.
And regarding agriculture and your comment, that's how people with actual power think.
Think of almost all major advances we've had, especially in terms of reducing costs. The vast majority of cost savings (and therefore improving quality of life for the average person) can be summarized as:
* put plastic (and fossil fuel derived materials) in EVERYTHING: if you don't believe this me, go to Amazon (or any supermarket, really) and pick a random product category and see how much the non-plastic version costs, frequently it's much, much more expensive (kudos to stainless steel and aluminum products frequently still holding the flag; but coming with other downsides, obviously)
* (more relevant to our discussion): industrialize human suffering and/or general environment degradation (push production to countries where labor and environmental/sustainability laws are lax and abuses are rampant): if you don't believe me, go to Amazon (or any supermarket, really) and pick a random product category and try to research their supply chain to see if it's produced ethically and sustainably
Oh, for bonus points, a huge percentage of the world economy works on BOTH at the same time.
Would I be correct in assuming that your name comes from 'The Point'? What a classic!
I also appreciate your point about the reality of agriculture, I think too often people miss just how narrow the margins there are and why farm life has always been so financially unstable. It used to be the weather that could make or break you, and it still is, but not world commodity markets, the price of fuel and fertilizer, and trends in a number of areas can all do it as well. Add in the top-down pressure to keep prices low and bottom-up pressure to target migrants and... what a rough mix.
I dream that AI robotic drones can reduce our dependence on vulnerable monocultures. Rather than a monoculture processed by million dollar combine harvesters using bulk techniques, a polyculture harvested by a swarm of small cheaper drones that work at the individual plant level.
I think this isn't going to hapen. The economy of the scale favors monoculture and it combines well with automation. The most likely outcome will be that combine harvester not requiring a driver and a synchronous operation of multiple harvesters as a robot swarm such that much bigger fields than currently possible could be worked: monoculture at a much bigger scale.
- Because you're pulling multiple crops off a field instead of one, the value of those crops is significantly higher.
- The crop is much more resilient. The different crops will have different tolerances to drought, disease, insects, wind and other disasters that commonly affect farming.
When farmland was cheap you could increase your profits per employee by buying more land and bigger machinery. But these days farmland is expensive and farmers are concentrating more on increasing yields per acre. In my area farmers spend > 10x as much per acre on inputs like fertilizers and pesticides than they used to in the 90's.
Polyculture will be hard and expensive, but if it lets you double profit per acre, farmers will do it.
The two crops are corn and soybeans. Everything else is decimal dust. I'm not sure how much sense it makes to mix them within a plot, as opposed to mixing them by crop rotation.
Also, all of the crops have to be herbicide resistant to coexist with corn and beans.
It makes a lot of sense to mix corns and beans. Corn is usually more profitable than soybeans, but they are rotated for soil health reasons. If you planted both together you wouldn't have to rotate.
Corn & beans are 2 of the "three sisters", the traditional native American agriculture technique.
You'd want to grow a shade tolerant bean, like cornfield beans. 80% of soybeans are fed to animals; the pigs won't care what type of bean they get fed.
You're not going to get a full yield of either the corn or the beans, but the corn harvest should be pretty close to a full yield and then the beans are pure bonus.
Already pretty much the case. They may have a driver as a monitor/troubleshooter but for planting and harvesting it's all optimized down to the inch with GPS guidance steering the machinery.
Two of my friends who farm already have self driving planters and harvesters, controlled by GPS, that lay down different kinds of seeds and fertilizers depending on location within their fields. The farmer is there to fix things.
I mean it does, until it doesn't and you loose all your crops/soil/water.
Monocultures degrade the soil, and you need to put more and more input in to make sure grow. Because there is no ground cover between crops, wind takes away your soil. If you mess up/mistime your pesticide/herbicide input, you'll loose all your crop. The more you grow, the more the soil turns to sand, requiring more fertiliser input, which mean more costs.
If you take the yield per m2 of an allotment, and compare it to a really high quality agricultural field (ie Lincolnshire fens, or some prime land in the USA.) the allotment will have a much higher yield with less input. I don't have the figures on hand, but you'll need to turn to the bearded hippies at the henry doubleday to get precise numbers.
If, through automation, you could have three or four crops in the same field, providing cover all year round. you could then start to keep your soil, because the wind cant get at it (crop dependant). you can grow sacrificial crops for pest control, meaning less pesticide input. This means more worm, which will stop flash flooding (more water permeability without ploughing)
But all that requires high speed "pick and place" weeding/harvesting machines. Those are going to be complex and expensive until scale kicks in (think how complex tractors were, or threshing machines)
There is a solid equilibrium in a commercial monoculture and artisanal and subsidised polycultures for insurance. The transition will never be easy. But at least the groundwork is there.
The future we’re already in should be characterized as cheap complexity. As an example, in manufacturing one offs were cost prohibitive, now it’s close enough to mass manufacturing cost that in many cases there is no point taking that extra step. Also people are increasingly concerned with food provenance, I would love to have a local automated greenhouse growing hairloom vegetables.
There aren't any combine models that sell more than a few thousand units per year. Individual parts in the combine benefit greatly from mass manufacturing, but the combines themselves don't really. Small harvester drones on the other hand could have a much larger sales volume, and really take advantage of mass manufacturing.
This is a very good point, but what about the maintenance of managing multiple small harvesters vs one big one? Latter is riskier if fails but you don't need to deal with a fleet, so easier for the farmer.
Maintenance would be a huge advantage for drone fleets, I would think. Harvest is often a ~2 week window. If your combine is down for a good chunk of that, you can get into real trouble. OTOH if one of your fleet goes down, just sideline it and deal with it during your other 50 weeks.
And it can be dealt with by shipping back to factory rather than incredibly expensive field calls.
I hope it goes that way bit I expect the opposite. They way big ag doesn't show much respect for nature I expect them to go even more into monoculture and using robots to wipe out all insects and plants they don't like.
Every year our state fair has dioramas to demonstrate the risks of mangling, amputation, and death.
I don't really want to see hallucinating LLMs making this even more dangerous despite how good it may make VCs feel. It's possible for it to not be a closed system but have someone's gain mean someone else's loss. (Arguments over closed vs open system are a sophistic tactic to ruin other people's lives for money.)
And the cattle farmers massively benefit from these things. There are now custom monitors being put on to cattle that constantly measure how much they eat, how much they walk, body temp, etc. If they fall out of expected range the system will call a vet automatically to come treat them as they're obviously sick. This is keeping the cattle healthier and the production numbers high.
Farmers are also really getting into things like drones for pesticide application as it's faster, more accurate, and has less waste.
It's happening whether or not people want to believe it, from Texas up to Illinois/Wisconsin and everywhere inbetween.
hey, if you want to get away from big tech and you're not scared of rural life -- farmers need IT folks. They have racks of Supermicro servers on premises that need maintaining because they can't trust the cloud // internet can be unreliable. They have sensors and repeaters on the field perimeters that need maintenance.
There's a lot of IT work to be done in rural America with a slower pace of life if you're not afraid of coexisting with country folk. For those of us that grew up there and migrated to the city for corporate IT jobs -- I expect we'll be going back to our roots and serving our communities with these skills instead so we don't have to deal with AI screened jobs and take-home programming tests
This is effectively my "dream" job for semi-retirement at the moment. I don't need to make top dollar any longer, but I crave doing something "real" that actually matters and I work for/talk to people who actually make useful things for humanity. I still need a decent income to pay for toys, hobbies, and time off work until I hit retirement age.
A contracting IT job trekking between a few farms and monitoring them remotely sounds pretty great to me! And right up my alley in terms of skillsets and interests.
If you’re talking about racks of servers, you’re talking a pretty large farming operation…they’re a bit rare. And those kids of farmers would like to stay in the community with well-paying jobs, and so communities try to raise their IT specialists locally and tend not to outsource even to the local Big City if they can help it. Farmer kids have ag in their blood and can support IT more effectively with that homegrown subject expertise.
What I wrote was a clumsy way to express the thought and particularly to use the term "existential generalization". I was thinking that agriculture doesn't include livestock, which was wrong and you pointed that out (thank you :D). I still object to the headline because "agriculture + farmer = crops" whereas "agriculture + rancher = livestock" they interviewed ranchers in one country and came out with a headline that made an assertion about farmers which seems like generalizing into agriculture and then re-instantiating into a subclass. The latter is valid to do but the generalization is taking finding about a smaller class and making claims about the broader class which is error prone at best. This occurs in a context where I have been reading about the use of machine learning for weed identification, weather prediction, saturation analysis, and a whole host of other purposes in the more crop oriented side of agriculture. That made the headline curious but I felt a bit lied to by it which fueled my original objection.
In developing countries, farming is left for those who has no opportunity or ability to do any other better work. Often uneducated, poorer, living in remote places without basic facilities.
Result? The farmers are forced to do extensive use of chemicals in farming, low nutrition, high yield GM/hybrid varieties and adulteration of whole foods. The food that comes out is laced with chemicals, poor quality varieties. And the urban consumer pays for their negligence of the farmer.
Access to information even for the global poor is almost universal. But like the old joke about the ag extension agent trying to get a farmer to improve his practices with information, “Heck, I don’t farm as well as I know how to today.”
Something like AI hallucinated produce? Random taste tomatoes anyone? Leaving the joke aside, probably GMO will probably accelerate with the help of AI and will still be called GMO foods.
GMO was already adopted before the resistance even manifested. It was a little bit more crude in the early days. Irradiate a field and select desirable traits among the mutants.
Your comment sent me down a rabbit hole. I assumed that GMO referred strictly to transgenic organisms, but the definition varies so much that even selective breeding has been considered GMO. So I guess we have had GMOs since the beginning of agriculture.
> When human bodies are scarce, as they often are in rural Australia, machines are created to fill the void.
I think they meant where labour costs are more than their ability to pay
Automation is seen in the more advanced countries, ones which lack an oppressed underclass like the US. There's much more automation on farms. Robotic milking is widely used in Australia, but less popular in the US. [1] New Zealand has the best automated slaughterhouse technology.[2] Those jobs are mostly done by illegal immigrants in the US, and the companies hiring them are screaming about stricter ICE enforcement.[3][4]
[1] https://dairy-cattle.extension.org/dairy-robotic-milking-sys...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdq1uBCI2Kw
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/06/23/dairy-industr...
[4] https://tucson.com/news/national/article_fe9b9724-1526-557b-...
This is secondhand and not firsthand knowledge, but one thing I've heard from a number of agtech founders (and sometimes farmers when we do diligence calls with them) is that hiring employees is very hard because of seasonality. E.g. you might need 100 workers most of the year, but 400 for a few weeks when it's picking season. And of course if you are in an area known for a single crop, all of the other local farms have the same seasonal labor need.
For these types of businesses, paying less for labor is a secondary goal and just having enough labor (human or machine) is the primary goal.
The US sugar beet harvest is like that, but seems to have structured itself around that.
Lots of websites recruiting people with RVs to come by and work the 2-3 week season. Others stay in motels or live close enough to drive.
https://www.google.com/search?q=beet+harvest+working
https://www.theunbeetableexperience.com/sugar-beet-harvest-f...
Some places have/had the schools close for the harvest season (and in others, for the start of hunting season).
Rural Australia also just has a desirability problem. Rural towns regularly offer significantly above market rate for GPs and teachers, but rarely ever fill the posts.
Sounds like they aren't actually market rate if the labor market is rejecting the prices at those levels.
Markets often dont model the real world well
Or there are some locations where markets just breakdown because the environmental factors overwhelm whatever salaries you offer.
Offshore oil rigs beg to differ. For almost any set of circumstances, there’s a salary that will entice people to fill the role. They just don’t want to shell out the mid six figure salary that would be required. It’s only a “breakdown” because we collectively feel entitled to have people fill the role but don’t want to actually pay what it costs.
Human entitlement really is the bane of game theory.
Salary is only part of the equation.
Offshore oil rigs deal in billions of dollars worth of hydrocarbons per day. The revenues make it feasible to offer high salaries and still generate massive returns. Many rural locations just aren't economically productive to justify the kinds of salaries necessary to draw people to them.
If we take for granted that "farm requires farmers, farmers require doctor", then the doctor should charge whatever market rate is for someone to work there, and the farmers should be paying that, drawing that from salary from the farm business, and that should be priced into the cost of the farm business's output?
Why can't the farms increase prices to support a basic quality-of-life for those living there?
I don't disagree there's some breakdown of the market here, but I'm not sure that saying "well there's not enough money coming in to the area" isn't stopping a step short.
I think farmers don't set their own prices, (there's nuance, but not really). They haul to middlemen who pay what they pay. Sometimes they even sell to transport companies / truckers that buy it to haul it to middlemen, both of whom pay what they can pay.
In that setting, the "regional" middlemen have the power to set prices, not the farmers, so a distant farmer from a poor community has no leverage over what teachers are paid in their community.
Generally speaking, I think almost all locally-produced, distributed industries work this way, by aggregating many producers the middleman has a ton of power to set prices, but of course is subject to the prices set by the next tier up, all the way to the commodities exchange, from what I can tell.
Anyway, this "averaging over a large area" ruins local economic efficiency.
There is always a price. At the right price, someone will go to teach in a war zone. This is not a hypothetical either, Libya has expats from the West to this day.
> Or there are some locations where markets just breakdown because the environmental factors overwhelm whatever salaries you offer.
There's literally no such thing - I wanna see an example!
The given scenario is not an example, because you can simply raise the offering until people take you up on it!
I mean, you can ask people to work in high-risk life-threatening environments and people will take you up on that offer IFFF the offer is high enough!
Want someone to work on a seabed? In an oil rig away from home for 9/12 months? In arctic conditions away from home for 3 years at a time? That's all happening right now.
Hell, you could put out an advertisement for volunteers on a one-way trip to Mars and you'll still get those positions filled!
If you cannot get teachers to move to a rural area, you are doing something wrong.[1]
[1] Where I am right now, I'll take that offer given a good enough salary and long enough contract. Many older teachers, maybe 10 years from retirement, will happily sell up and semi-retire to teach a few more years renting in a rural area before actual retirement. If they aren't doing it, it's because the offer is too low.
Human bodies are scarce because you can't pay most people to live there. They're not mutually exclusive.
Yes but the point of the poster is the framing of the conversation.
There is no labour shortage, there is a salary shortage. And we, as the collective global community of serfs and plebes must realize this, and call it for what it is.
There is currently a massive teacher shortage in Ireland, with something like >1800 unfilled posts and we're approaching the new school term. There is no teacher shortage, there is however an abundance of catholic-church-controlled schools with overly restrictive hiring policy, with many newly qualified teachers not really interested in becoming involved in religious things. Teachers are paid well here, but clearly not well enough for many of them to be willing to subject themselves to draconic requirements such as needing to provide catholic teachings to kids taking fucking math.
Agriculture is bottom of the barrel business because no political power worth its weight allows price gouging. Food has to be kept as cheap as possible because otherwise the economy doesn't work. The workaround for this is subsidies, but those don't scale. You can't agriculture your way into Google Ads, the money printing machine.
Could you elaborate on "subsidies don't scale"? In the US, farm subsidies are a huge chunk of our budget and, to the best of my understanding, help keep food prices low. I'm not informed enough to know if it's an inefficient solution though.
that is incorrect. 2023 US Payments to agriculture [1] were $10.972 billion. That is 0.04% of GDP or ~0.697% of the federal budget[2] for 2023. It spiked slightly in 2020, but has been a small portion of the budget for a long time.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/L312041A027NBEA
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M318191Q027NBEA
[3] https://imgur.com/a/dwgS0m6
I guess it's a matter of perspective, I know 0.7% isn't the biggest item in the budget but it's a fairly large line item to my mind. Either way I still wonder what the "does not scale" comment meant.
Edit: re-reading my comment, I regret my word choice, "a huge chunk" is obviously incorrect.
First of all, 11 billion is 0.17% of the federal budget. (Which is ~6 trillion). You were looking at a quarterly budget, not the annual one.
Secondly, that 0.17% that is spent on food security has dramatically better ROI than the 1.7% of it that is spent on, to pick a random line item... maintaining 5 (of 11) carrier strike groups[1].
---
[1] For contrast, the entire rest of the world put together has exactly 2 carrier strike groups. Somehow, I'd have to prioritize people getting three meals a day over nearly anything else the government could be doing.
The subsidies are combined with cheap indentured semi legal labor from south of the border. Remove either one and the whole system falls apart.
Indentured?
You can't anything your way to miracle profits without destroying society in the process.
I suppose destroying society for profit is top of the barrel for people like you.
> You can't anything your way to miracle profits without destroying society in the process
Wat. You really don’t see any technology that created win-wins?
No such thing as a win-win. Just a lose we haven't come up with a name or explanation for yet.
> people like you
I'm a regular Joe on the internet, with a regular job.
And regarding agriculture and your comment, that's how people with actual power think.
Think of almost all major advances we've had, especially in terms of reducing costs. The vast majority of cost savings (and therefore improving quality of life for the average person) can be summarized as:
* put plastic (and fossil fuel derived materials) in EVERYTHING: if you don't believe this me, go to Amazon (or any supermarket, really) and pick a random product category and see how much the non-plastic version costs, frequently it's much, much more expensive (kudos to stainless steel and aluminum products frequently still holding the flag; but coming with other downsides, obviously)
* (more relevant to our discussion): industrialize human suffering and/or general environment degradation (push production to countries where labor and environmental/sustainability laws are lax and abuses are rampant): if you don't believe me, go to Amazon (or any supermarket, really) and pick a random product category and try to research their supply chain to see if it's produced ethically and sustainably
Oh, for bonus points, a huge percentage of the world economy works on BOTH at the same time.
Would I be correct in assuming that your name comes from 'The Point'? What a classic!
I also appreciate your point about the reality of agriculture, I think too often people miss just how narrow the margins there are and why farm life has always been so financially unstable. It used to be the weather that could make or break you, and it still is, but not world commodity markets, the price of fuel and fertilizer, and trends in a number of areas can all do it as well. Add in the top-down pressure to keep prices low and bottom-up pressure to target migrants and... what a rough mix.
I dream that AI robotic drones can reduce our dependence on vulnerable monocultures. Rather than a monoculture processed by million dollar combine harvesters using bulk techniques, a polyculture harvested by a swarm of small cheaper drones that work at the individual plant level.
I think this isn't going to hapen. The economy of the scale favors monoculture and it combines well with automation. The most likely outcome will be that combine harvester not requiring a driver and a synchronous operation of multiple harvesters as a robot swarm such that much bigger fields than currently possible could be worked: monoculture at a much bigger scale.
Polyculture has two very significant advantages.
- Because you're pulling multiple crops off a field instead of one, the value of those crops is significantly higher.
- The crop is much more resilient. The different crops will have different tolerances to drought, disease, insects, wind and other disasters that commonly affect farming.
When farmland was cheap you could increase your profits per employee by buying more land and bigger machinery. But these days farmland is expensive and farmers are concentrating more on increasing yields per acre. In my area farmers spend > 10x as much per acre on inputs like fertilizers and pesticides than they used to in the 90's.
Polyculture will be hard and expensive, but if it lets you double profit per acre, farmers will do it.
I would love that to happen. It will happen if it's economically more competitive.
The two crops are corn and soybeans. Everything else is decimal dust. I'm not sure how much sense it makes to mix them within a plot, as opposed to mixing them by crop rotation.
Also, all of the crops have to be herbicide resistant to coexist with corn and beans.
Now, for things like veggies, sure.
> The two crops are corn and soybeans.
Well, that's mostly because this was convenient for mass monoculture.
We've killed crop diversity as a byproduct, but polyculture could open up opportunities to fix that.
It makes a lot of sense to mix corns and beans. Corn is usually more profitable than soybeans, but they are rotated for soil health reasons. If you planted both together you wouldn't have to rotate.
Corn & beans are 2 of the "three sisters", the traditional native American agriculture technique.
Will the beans get any sun?
You'd want to grow a shade tolerant bean, like cornfield beans. 80% of soybeans are fed to animals; the pigs won't care what type of bean they get fed.
Indeed, the only variable is yield.
You're not going to get a full yield of either the corn or the beans, but the corn harvest should be pretty close to a full yield and then the beans are pure bonus.
> Also, all of the crops have to be herbicide resistant to coexist with corn and beans.
For now. There's already significant R&D on robotic versions of herbicide.
> combine harvester not requiring a driver
Already pretty much the case. They may have a driver as a monitor/troubleshooter but for planting and harvesting it's all optimized down to the inch with GPS guidance steering the machinery.
So long as someone hasn't nicked the fucking GPS...
Don't many of these operate on local boundaries as well, not just GPS? (honest question, I only have a vague recollection of something like this)
That might exist, but rtk GPS is cheaper and needs less maintenance.
https://www.farmads.co.uk/product/buqcr-27-06-2025-104659/ its more that people nick those units (well used to, im not sure how nickable they are nowadays)
I believe farmers can install local beacons which can supplement/replace GPS.
Correct, and doing that has become so trivial today, newer lawnmower robots come with it. I see the base stations everywhere across suburbia.
Two of my friends who farm already have self driving planters and harvesters, controlled by GPS, that lay down different kinds of seeds and fertilizers depending on location within their fields. The farmer is there to fix things.
> The economy of the scale favors monoculture
I mean it does, until it doesn't and you loose all your crops/soil/water.
Monocultures degrade the soil, and you need to put more and more input in to make sure grow. Because there is no ground cover between crops, wind takes away your soil. If you mess up/mistime your pesticide/herbicide input, you'll loose all your crop. The more you grow, the more the soil turns to sand, requiring more fertiliser input, which mean more costs.
If you take the yield per m2 of an allotment, and compare it to a really high quality agricultural field (ie Lincolnshire fens, or some prime land in the USA.) the allotment will have a much higher yield with less input. I don't have the figures on hand, but you'll need to turn to the bearded hippies at the henry doubleday to get precise numbers.
If, through automation, you could have three or four crops in the same field, providing cover all year round. you could then start to keep your soil, because the wind cant get at it (crop dependant). you can grow sacrificial crops for pest control, meaning less pesticide input. This means more worm, which will stop flash flooding (more water permeability without ploughing)
But all that requires high speed "pick and place" weeding/harvesting machines. Those are going to be complex and expensive until scale kicks in (think how complex tractors were, or threshing machines)
> you loose all your crops/soil/water
> you'll loose all your crop
Is there a way to tighten your crops after they become loose or beforehand so they don't loosen in the first place?
my cup punneth over
There is a solid equilibrium in a commercial monoculture and artisanal and subsidised polycultures for insurance. The transition will never be easy. But at least the groundwork is there.
Isn't monoculture farming heavily subsidized too? Either directly or indirectly.
The future we’re already in should be characterized as cheap complexity. As an example, in manufacturing one offs were cost prohibitive, now it’s close enough to mass manufacturing cost that in many cases there is no point taking that extra step. Also people are increasingly concerned with food provenance, I would love to have a local automated greenhouse growing hairloom vegetables.
There aren't any combine models that sell more than a few thousand units per year. Individual parts in the combine benefit greatly from mass manufacturing, but the combines themselves don't really. Small harvester drones on the other hand could have a much larger sales volume, and really take advantage of mass manufacturing.
This is a very good point, but what about the maintenance of managing multiple small harvesters vs one big one? Latter is riskier if fails but you don't need to deal with a fleet, so easier for the farmer.
Maintenance would be a huge advantage for drone fleets, I would think. Harvest is often a ~2 week window. If your combine is down for a good chunk of that, you can get into real trouble. OTOH if one of your fleet goes down, just sideline it and deal with it during your other 50 weeks.
And it can be dealt with by shipping back to factory rather than incredibly expensive field calls.
As they say in IT: cattle, not pets.
I hope it goes that way bit I expect the opposite. They way big ag doesn't show much respect for nature I expect them to go even more into monoculture and using robots to wipe out all insects and plants they don't like.
They'll do it if it's profitable. More output per acre is a pretty big motivation.
Grad students will work on the problem for the ecological benefits. Then big ag will scoop it up for the profit motive.
Or at least reduce the need for pesticides
> what farmers want: technologies that may not have a lot of bells and whistles, but can reliably take a task off their hands.
I'm sure they are not alone.
TIL I am a bugs farmer, not a software engineer.
I am a backlog, hear me score.
>> but can reliably take a task off their hands
Tasks can reliably take off farmers' hands.
Every year our state fair has dioramas to demonstrate the risks of mangling, amputation, and death.
I don't really want to see hallucinating LLMs making this even more dangerous despite how good it may make VCs feel. It's possible for it to not be a closed system but have someone's gain mean someone else's loss. (Arguments over closed vs open system are a sophistic tactic to ruin other people's lives for money.)
> Our research team conducted more than 35 interviews with farmers, specifically livestock producers
Not agriculture, cattle
And the cattle farmers massively benefit from these things. There are now custom monitors being put on to cattle that constantly measure how much they eat, how much they walk, body temp, etc. If they fall out of expected range the system will call a vet automatically to come treat them as they're obviously sick. This is keeping the cattle healthier and the production numbers high.
Farmers are also really getting into things like drones for pesticide application as it's faster, more accurate, and has less waste.
It's happening whether or not people want to believe it, from Texas up to Illinois/Wisconsin and everywhere inbetween.
hey, if you want to get away from big tech and you're not scared of rural life -- farmers need IT folks. They have racks of Supermicro servers on premises that need maintaining because they can't trust the cloud // internet can be unreliable. They have sensors and repeaters on the field perimeters that need maintenance.
There's a lot of IT work to be done in rural America with a slower pace of life if you're not afraid of coexisting with country folk. For those of us that grew up there and migrated to the city for corporate IT jobs -- I expect we'll be going back to our roots and serving our communities with these skills instead so we don't have to deal with AI screened jobs and take-home programming tests
The way they are treating cattle as pure machines to optimize production I can only hope synthetic meat will come soon.
This is effectively my "dream" job for semi-retirement at the moment. I don't need to make top dollar any longer, but I crave doing something "real" that actually matters and I work for/talk to people who actually make useful things for humanity. I still need a decent income to pay for toys, hobbies, and time off work until I hit retirement age.
A contracting IT job trekking between a few farms and monitoring them remotely sounds pretty great to me! And right up my alley in terms of skillsets and interests.
If you’re talking about racks of servers, you’re talking a pretty large farming operation…they’re a bit rare. And those kids of farmers would like to stay in the community with well-paying jobs, and so communities try to raise their IT specialists locally and tend not to outsource even to the local Big City if they can help it. Farmer kids have ag in their blood and can support IT more effectively with that homegrown subject expertise.
"Cattle production is the most important U.S. agricultural industry" [1]
"Animal husbandry, is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, or other products" [2]
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_husbandry
Thanks for the definitions. Doesn't make for a better existential generalization from the more specific to the more general term.
I have trouble following: "Doesn't make for a better existential generalization from the more specific to the more general term."
I kinda think I know what you mean, but could use clarification as I might be offbase.
Sorry to reply with only definitions. Just giving evidence that livestock farming is considered agriculture.
What I wrote was a clumsy way to express the thought and particularly to use the term "existential generalization". I was thinking that agriculture doesn't include livestock, which was wrong and you pointed that out (thank you :D). I still object to the headline because "agriculture + farmer = crops" whereas "agriculture + rancher = livestock" they interviewed ranchers in one country and came out with a headline that made an assertion about farmers which seems like generalizing into agriculture and then re-instantiating into a subclass. The latter is valid to do but the generalization is taking finding about a smaller class and making claims about the broader class which is error prone at best. This occurs in a context where I have been reading about the use of machine learning for weed identification, weather prediction, saturation analysis, and a whole host of other purposes in the more crop oriented side of agriculture. That made the headline curious but I felt a bit lied to by it which fueled my original objection.
A large industry, but also a much smaller group than ‘live stock producers’.
Waiting for the title to change to "The future of farming"
I don't need (more) automation on this farm, I need (lots) of help shifting product. I can make a lot more than I'm able to sell!
In developing countries, farming is left for those who has no opportunity or ability to do any other better work. Often uneducated, poorer, living in remote places without basic facilities.
Result? The farmers are forced to do extensive use of chemicals in farming, low nutrition, high yield GM/hybrid varieties and adulteration of whole foods. The food that comes out is laced with chemicals, poor quality varieties. And the urban consumer pays for their negligence of the farmer.
In low income economies over 50% of population 10 years and older own a mobile phone.
https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24...
Access to information even for the global poor is almost universal. But like the old joke about the ag extension agent trying to get a farmer to improve his practices with information, “Heck, I don’t farm as well as I know how to today.”
I wonder how long GMO (the in the lab kind) took to get adopted after surely initial resistance.
Will we see AI-free food? Will it become a part of being “organic”?
Something like AI hallucinated produce? Random taste tomatoes anyone? Leaving the joke aside, probably GMO will probably accelerate with the help of AI and will still be called GMO foods.
GMO was already adopted before the resistance even manifested. It was a little bit more crude in the early days. Irradiate a field and select desirable traits among the mutants.
Your comment sent me down a rabbit hole. I assumed that GMO referred strictly to transgenic organisms, but the definition varies so much that even selective breeding has been considered GMO. So I guess we have had GMOs since the beginning of agriculture.
"Human made" will be a sign of quality, like the "organic" label.
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Agriculture is one of the few fields where "shit in" is a expected, good thing. A fertiliser on the fields.