World's First Robotic Farm To Produce 11 Million Heads of Lettuce Per Year (inhabitat.com)

MikeChino writes: Japanese company SPREAD is preparing to open the world's first robot-controlled farm. The facility is designed to produce 11 million heads of lettuce each year, and it's expected to ship its first crop in Fall 2017. The new 47,300 square feet Vegetable Factory in Kansai Science City will also reduce construction costs by 25 percent and energy demand by 30 percent.

Comments

Re:environmental impact

[bluefoxlucid]

Hunter-gatherer man used to spend 15-20 hours per week per person to collect food. Now 2% of our population are farmers; the rest are busy building information super highways and rocket ships.

I should start over with this paper. I instead started blogging, as I wanted to study more classical and modern economic theory so as to directly assault the field. One of the biggest problems I'm having is dividing the information: I've got a general theory of economic behavior, covering the growth of wealth, the cycle of (un)employment, scarcity, and population growth and restriction; and then I have things like inflation, supply-and-demand theory (mine explains why high-demand goods are cheaper, while low-demand goods are more expensive--this is what subjective theory of value tried to handwave away), and extension theories all the way out to taxes.

The description of how reduction of labor per good creates a cycle of unemployment and re-employment leading to the production of more goods per person (and thus a higher general standard of living) is *not* in the same class as an explanation of how taxes on labor affect unemployment. My biggest criticism about modern economics is its pathological focus on store prices and stock markets; the base theories I produce may lead to arguments about store prices and unemployment, but they're not about value. I've rejected value as a valid economic concept.