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GPS Meets Agriculture for Precision Farming
mskfisher writes "NASA Science News is reporting a story on a NASA project called Ag20/20, which involves farmers using GPS-aided crop and field analysis to improve accuracy and yields.
Instead of blanketing the whole area with a set level of pesticide or fertilizer, they can now vary it via computer, based on IR and soil data gathered from aircraft, satellites, and tractor-mounted sensors."
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
the fact that satelite usage is now cheap enough to make this cost effective.
/., this is the one that makes me most optimistic about the space program.
We complain that space is not being pushed enough, and THIS is what will make people invest in NASA's technology. Whenever the demand exists for a product, the market finds a way to deliver it as cheaply as possible, in order to maximize profit margins. This is the technology that will enable the space industry to bring the cost per pound of lifting stuff down.
Of all of the space stories in the past year that I have seen on
The only part that worries me is that there are not enough satelites to fill current demand, so planes are being used instead as the inferior alternative.
"Satellite images, which require more time to downlink and process, can take from 2 to 7 days to reach a farmer.
Such delays won't be a problem forever, though. 'Technology is advancing quickly and more of these commercial satellites are being launched each year,' he added."
I'm a concientious
Alternatively we could get a clue and start paying the farmers what the market will bear, instead of subsidising them to produce grossly-resource intensive crap that destroys our health, screws the environment, costs us billions in tax (for subsidies), whilst millions starve, and only agrichemical multinationals and food processors benefit.
some , further reading...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
A trend of paying off farmers to limit their productions, while trying to improve their crop yeild with technoligy?
contradiction in goals and practice?
Perhaps not.
If a farmer can use his rescources to the greatest possible result, he might be able to become self reliant again. Today most farmers are supplimented by govt. assistance programs. If the GPS system and other technological advancements help without raising the cost unreasonably. And the land that was needed was reduced in size and produced the same or more produce, this could free the farmers from needing assistance.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
>In a system of larger agricultural farms, farm owners tend to be very rich and farm workers are very poor: the rural economy is transformed from one of self-suficiency to one in which farmers are forced to make livings as wage earners. The point is, more small farms means more farmers producing for themselves rather than becoming dependent on the poor wages derived from farm work.
The problem with small farms here in America, is that the economics of food, combined with the overhead of our society, has made it very hard to keep a farm that is small enough to be run by a typical family.
Farms must get bigger in order to make enough to stay in business. We all bitch and moan if the price of milk goes up by a nickel a gallon. After the grocery, and the middle men, and the processors all take their cut, that leaves about 1 penny for the dairymen. In USA the price of milk to farmers right now is about what it was in 1981. You can bet everything else has gone up.
Even the small diversified subsistance farmer, who plans to grow a variety of crops and products that he can eat and use himself, still needs to make enough money to pay local taxes, school taxes, state taxes, federal taxes, sales taxes, a mortgage, and put his kids through 4 years a Cornell.
Kevin
It is scary what get marked as "insightful" here.
Producing more and more food in an environmentally healthy way is basic requirement due to the population growth.
This is completely ortogonal to the question of solving the social and political problems that provent a fair distribution of the produced food and keep the population growth going.
Even if we do solve these problems in the best case we should expect the population to top in one or two generations at 15 to 20 billion people, due to the age distribition of the world population, and cultural resistance to change.
We need to fight at both fronts to get through this situation without mass starvation worse than everything seen on this planet before combined.
We need the technical means to increase production that much without destroying the environment in the process, and we need the social, economical and political changes that ensure this technoclogy is employed as well as ensure the population growth does eventually top in acceptable ways.
Believing we can get through with either technical or social changes alone is dangerously naive.