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Sensor Network Makes Life Easier For Japan's Aging Rice Farmers
szczys writes: The average age of Japan's rice farmers is 65-70 years old. The work is difficult and even small changes to the way things are done can have a profound impact on these lives. The flooded paddies where the rice is grown must maintain a consistent water level, which means farmers must regularly traverse the terraced fields to check many different paddies. A simple sensor board is changing this, letting farmers check their fields by phone instead of in person.
This might not sound like much, but reducing the number of times someone needs to walk the fields has a big effect on the man-hours spent on each crop. The system, called TechRice, is inexpensive and the nodes recharge batteries from a solar cell. The data is aggregated on the Internet and can be presented as a webpage, a text-message interface, or any other reporting scheme imaginable by utilizing the API of the Open Source software. This is a testament to the power we have as small groups of engineers to improve the world.
This might not sound like much, but reducing the number of times someone needs to walk the fields has a big effect on the man-hours spent on each crop. The system, called TechRice, is inexpensive and the nodes recharge batteries from a solar cell. The data is aggregated on the Internet and can be presented as a webpage, a text-message interface, or any other reporting scheme imaginable by utilizing the API of the Open Source software. This is a testament to the power we have as small groups of engineers to improve the world.
Fewer man-hours, more rice from less work, fewer farmers, less time spent working, less paid in wages, more produced, cheaper rice.
We still have people claiming value and wealth come from land, not from labor. Marx claimed more labor to produce a product meant more value and thus more wealth; I've outright demonstrated wealth comes from reducing labor spent on producing goods.
Then again, I abandoned theories of value when I started making my economic theories; I'm writing a theory of *wealth*, not an explanation of how something's inherent price comes along. Value was always a stupid idea with no place in macroeconomics.
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I told my mom once about a recently deceased centenarian in the news who had boasted about eating chocolate every day. Mom retorted, "Well, if she didn't eat it, she might have lived even longer." Moral of the story: you can never win an argument with your mom.