Slashdot Asks: Will Farming Be Fully Automated in the Future? (bbc.com)

BBC has a report today in which, citing several financial institutions and analysts, it claims that in the not-too-distant future, our fields could be tilled, sown, tended and harvested entirely by fleets of co-operating autonomous machines by land and air. An excerpt from the article: Driverless tractors that can follow pre-programmed routes are already being deployed at large farms around the world. Drones are buzzing over fields assessing crop health and soil conditions. Ground sensors are monitoring the amount of water and nutrients in the soil, triggering irrigation and fertilizer applications. And in Japan, the world's first entirely automated lettuce farm is due for launch next year. The future of farming is automated. The World Bank says we'll need to produce 50% more food by 2050 if the global population continues to rise at its current pace. But the effects of climate change could see crop yields falling by more than a quarter. So autonomous tractors, ground-based sensors, flying drones and enclosed hydroponic farms could all help farmers produce more food, more sustainably at lower cost.What are your thoughts on this?

Comments

No

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

someone remembered that "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:No

[Z00L00K]

Entirely automated farming also poses a risk, and if you have worked on a farm you realize that there are always things that are unpredictable that will require manual handling. Nature is unpredictable, and equipment have a tendency to break or malfunction in new interesting ways each time.

Re:No

[saloomy]

What risk? That someone has to go out and mend the machine when it farms, or insert an

if(tornado){
stayInside;
}else{
harvest;
}

statement in the code? Nonsense. What do you imagine will happen automation arrives at farms? The supply of food will increase, and the price will decrease. Same thing for trucking and the volume of goods carried down the world's roadways. The volume of cargo will go up, and the cost to move it will drop. Thats more economic productivity, which means more for all. Simply awesome.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Not more for all. More for those who still have incomes.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Headline: Has anyone on Slashdot ever gotten laid?

Re: No

[ShanghaiBill]

Not more for all. More for those who still have incomes.

As supply increases and costs fall, it will take less income to afford the same food.

In America, less than 1% of workers are farmers. In Ethiopia, 80% are farmers. Do you think Ethiopians are better off because they have more farm jobs?

Re:No

[dbIII]

See also automating lawyers or your own job.
Suggesting that automating your own job is easy is something that can be done with confidence if you know it could be done. Suggesting that automating tasks that you've only seen on TV is easy is a little bit different.

Oh yes, they are only farmers (or insert your own job title here) - how hard could it be?
Can you see the problem yet?

Re: No

[Jesus H Rolle]

It's hard to make farming robots farm farms, and better to make farms farming robots can farm. To use a car analogy, self-driving cars are hard. Self-driving trains are easy.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Except history hasn't shown that. As national wealth has increased, homelessness, drug users, youth delinquency, and mental health issues have all skyrocketed.

Yes yes I know it's due to better reporting now. How dare I insinuate that progress hasn't been an unmitigated road to Nirvana.

Re: No

[Hognoxious]

I saw a completely robotic greenhouse on TV once. All laid out in straight lines, so the machines could move along a sort of rails/gantry contraption to do their work.

Of course that's a bit easier - it's smaller and enclosed.

Re: No

[bestweasel]

When robots started replacing humans in the factories, there was talk that we were entering a new age of freedom where we'd only have to work three days a week and there'd be prosperity and leisure for all.

What happened instead was, the jobs went and the ex-workers were left to fend for themselves and their families as best they could, which in an area with fewer jobs and less wealth was often 'not very well'.

The farm jobs will go and the only share of the benefits of efficiency which the ex-farmers will see is that their food might be a bit cheaper.

Re:No

[Z00L00K]

I can think of a few:
  - Someone has inserted an alternate crop in your harvest.
  - The soil/ground is not suitable for the processing you intend to do.
  - Animals in the field - wild or domesticated doesn't matter, it can cause problems.
  - Campers in your field.
  - Equipment failure - ranging from puncture on a support wheel to broken parts or roots stuck in your plow.
  - Garbage or other foreign objects present in the field.

Been there, done that in many of the above cases. There's often something unexpected that comes up and so far machinery isn't able to figure out all the small pesky special cases.

Re:No

[Rande]

Yep, need to have the masters to oversee the slaves, because sometimes they do stupid shit and you have to tune them up.

Re: No

[easyTree]

Until the robot teamsters organise.

Re:No

[TheRaven64]

It's worth noting that robotic sheepdogs were effectively perfected well over a decade ago (John Billingsley worked on them), yet I've never seen one in use outside of a tech demo, because dogs are a lot cheaper, even factoring in the requirement for human supervision (the robotic ones can round up the cows, herd them through the milking machines, and back out into the field, without supervision).

Modern farms use so much automation already that the cost of the humans is really small, except in a few specialised cases (fruit picking, for example, is still very labour intensive and the machines that can do it are very complex and so far this means unreliable and expensive).

Farming will almost certainly be completely automated at some point, but it's unlikely to be a priority because all of the low-hanging fruit (if you'll pardon the pun) for automation has been picked.

Re:No

[sheramil]

why do you imagine that farming has to take place outside? haven't you ever seen those weed grow boxes that are about the size of a refrigerator? they could grow other crops. then all you'd need was a dinky little lego robot arm to reach out and yank off the seeds now and then. then have hundreds of grow boxes. less chance of a horde of locusts eating your crop, more control over how much water gets wasted.. only problem is the frequent raids from police who don't believe you're actually growing corn.

Re:No

[Rei]

You're going to see a steady conversion rather than some sudden leaps-and-bounds shifts. Step by step, crop by crop. Even the picking of fruits, nuts, olives, etc is increasingly starting to be done by machines. Even things you'd think would be too delicate for machines, like grapes.

Ag tech always starts out expensive, but it gets cheaper the more people who use it.

Re:No

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

At a population level, farming is close to automated. When ~2% of the population is farming and the rest of us aren't starving you know that we've wrung serious gains in efficiency out of the process.

As with many areas, though, it gets harder to justify once you pick off the low hanging fruit. If you absolutely must have your tech demo, robotics can probably provide something that at least doesn't have any visible humans except when techs are on site dealing with failures; but you'd have to be replacing some pretty expensive farmers to have it make any sense.

Re:No

[xtsigs]

Removing "nature" from the list of variables would probably eventually be cost effective. Vertical farming and other indoor, controlled techniques show promise though some ideas might not scale well. Still, that seems to be the trend. Potentially, it can solve a host of problems such as water and fertilizer usage as well as reducing the need for intensive labor. We're not there yet, but the economic benefits will probably make outdoor farming as we know it obsolete.

Covering entire orchards seems like a huge expense and may take longer, but water, pests, frost, and other problems are expensive to manage. Perhaps there are ways to get more yield with fewer trees if conditions can be better controlled.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

They have automated lawyers. Banks were robo-claiming ownership on properties where the owners had defaulted on the mortgage payments. Automated systems would take lists of names and addresses, then automatically print out the legal documents to the relevant law departments regardless of whether the address was correct or not.

The only problem was that some owners had taken out multiple jumbo mortgages, and the other lenders had already auctioned off the properties to mitigate their losses. So someone suddenly found their home being repossessed for no legal reason.

Re:No

[hattig]

Indeed, this is like IT replacing typing pools, etc.

Instead of having armies of crop pickers doing seasonal work, you will get the machines in (standard agricultural hiring patterns), and they will come with their team of maintainers/fixers/programmers. This team will be far smaller than the army of crop pickers, but more expensive per person.

It may be that farms will need to build higher quality accommodation for the higher paid maintenance teams - they might be able to get away with tents and barns for seasonal workers, but that probably won't fly in the future.

All signs point to most repetitive manual work being automated at some point in the future, which will be catastrophic for people who only work in those areas who don't upskill. Basic Wage is one possible solution, starvation riots another.

Re:No

[Cryacin]

$500 corn tastes better too!

Re:No

[hattig]

Alternate crop - visual recognition systems are very advanced now. It'll know that the Cabbage isn't a Cauliflower.

Soil not suitable - how is that different from now, i.e., how is it relevant?

Animals - yeah, easily avoided or scared away. However QA for partially eaten crop would be needed - likely again an AI that visually inspects crops and rejects according to a range of criteria (mould, damage, etc).

Campers can get processed, the rude sods.

There will be a maintenance crew for the equipment. Note that most farms will hire in harvesting machines, so they will come with a crew to operate (the machines usually follow the season across the country).

Garbage should be easily identifiable. The crew can remove it.

Re: No

[dbIII]

and better to make farms farming robots can farm

Perhaps.
Do you know enough about farming to know that? From a few years of exposure I know enough about the topic to know I do not know enough. Are you sure you know are you guessing from afar like all the others?
Put it the other way round - engineering - how difficult could it possibly be? Just press a button and get a computer to design a car.
Getting it yet?

Re: No

[blackest_k]

I've been inside one automated greenhouse that produces potted herbs. there is a machine which fills the pots with compost and adds seeds thats relatively simple. The pots go onto a tray that sits on two tubular rails and they get automatically watered. there is a robot which works beween the rails which lifts up the tray and moves it forward. Essentially pots with seeds at one end and ready to sell herbs at the other . with the robots doing the heavy lifting no need for walkways between the rows so maximizes the use of the space. It tends to be uncomfortably warm and humid in there. I think it was a dutch company that owned the factory which was in south lincolnshire this was around the late 90's. I think the loading and unloading at each end was manual.

A crisp or chip factory has pretty good automation. A trailer loaded with potato's has a small conveyor in the bottom of it. This is plugged in at one end of the line the potatos drop into a flume which is full of water which pumps them through a pipe up to a 3 stage peeler. It is essentially 3 sets of rollers with a coarse medium and fine grit this removes the skins.

Onto the grader halver big potato's get cut in half and then onto an elevator. it carries the potatoes up to the cutters, it has a sensor monitoring the weight and adjusts the feed speed and the overall production rate,

This feeds the cutters these are like a cauldron which spins, potatoes drop in there and the potatoes get sliced with razor blades set in the side. These blades need changing on a regular basis (human needed). There were 3 of them so 1 would get changed while the other 2 keep working.

Next step is a bath which removes starch which is harvested. Then the chips hits the fryer, this is a bus size fryer the chips are kept submerged under the oil and a PID maintains the temperature adjusting the burners that heat the oil. There is like a chain conveyor which keeps them moving along the fryer.

Coming out the oil they go on to a fast moving conveyor, at the end of which there is a small conveyor which the chips jump over. Here there is a camera system which is looking for burnt chips. If it spots any it directs air jets to blast them into the small conveyor, the rest passing through to a bucket elevator. the ones that get diverted onto the cross feed conveyor go through the camera system again because the first pass will take out some good chips as well as burnt ones.

The bucket elevator feeds a storevayor which can hold up to about 10 tons of chips, sensors show were there is space for more chips and the belt feeds out to a system of vibrating stainless steel conveyors which feed the flavor stations.

When the flavor station needs more product they call for more product and a side ways vibration is used to divert to the flavor station. the storevayor gives some flexibility to the system and feeds back to the earlier stages.

flavor stations are fairly simple there is some thing like a galvanized dustbin ,which the chips feed into, on its side which rotates and a screw feed which feeds the flavoring through a small pipe the rotation of the drum mixes the flavor with the chips.

This feeds a check head weigher the chips land on a central cone and around that are little hoppers which weigh the product. each will have some random quantity of product and will release a combination that meets the minimum weight requirement e.g 12g and 13g to make a 25g packet.

The packet is actually a sheet of film which is wrapped into a bag and sealed when the chips start falling there is no bag and its formed as they are falling. the top of one bag when it is sealed makes the bottom of the next. these then hit another small conveyor with a section that weighs the bags any that are out of tolerance get rejected.

The packing in boxes can be manual but there is a robot system which takes a flat box opens it and then a lifter picks up 8 packets it has a sucker for each packet if it doesnt sense a packet it rejects the 7 and has

Re:No

[dbIII]

It's worth noting that robotic sheepdogs

One of the oddest things I've seen along those lines was a robotic cow designed to help train cattle dogs. That was sometime around 2000 and I'm not sure what happened with it.

Re:No

[um... Lucas]

>Nonsense. What do you imagine will happen automation arrives at farms? The supply of food will increase, and the price will decrease. Same thing for trucking and the volume of goods carried down the world's roadways. The volume of cargo will go up, and the cost to move it will drop. Thats more economic productivity, which means more for all. Simply awesome.

Short sighted and fails to see many pitfalls.

First off, automation will only be available to those who can afford it. IE multinational corporations. Whether that's good or bad is your perspective, but it will spell the end of many small businesses. Many will sell, some will take on bank debt to try to compete under the new "rules" of labor being a one-time fixed cost that you amortize over an amount of years, rather than being able to pay as they go. That, or they'll cut wages even lower than they already are. And that work force was a million people in 2012.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topic...

Second, independantly of that, transportation is another industry that's being threatened with being automated away. That's 6.8 million people (3 million truck drivers, people loading, unloading, etc). Not counting independent contractors, owner/operators, which are very prevalent.

http://www.trucking.org/News_a...

So, food is now cheaper, but you've taken away the means for millions and millions of people to actually purchase food.

And you last supposition, the volume of cargo will go up and the price to move it will drop. That's not correct - the cost to ship things doesn't drop as more stuff needs to get shipped, it rises as producers with more and more product to ship bid against one another in an effort to secure access to a limited resource. Gasoline prices stay constant, tire costs are constant, and the trucks themselves are fixed costs - you don't achieve new economies of scale by shipping more and more, you're locked in battle fighting over the same resources as not only your competition in that industry, but with every industry that has goods they want to ship to market. In the short term, that's higher profit margins for transportation companies, but in the longer term, that means they'll need to expand their fleets to capture more of that lost revenue - whose cost will be passed on to us as well.

So. We produce more food. We have far fewer people able to afford it. You lose tons of small/family farms in order to redistribute that income to Wall Street. And shipping prices most certainly rise, not just for foodstuffs, but for anything else that could be shipped on those same trucks as well.

Re: No

[johnsmithperson123]

I doubt farms will become much more automated and mechanized than they already are. GMOs are the big thing, provided the government lets it happen, along with factory printed meat.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

To paraphrase Heinlein - 'Dogs can make other dogs, that's a trick that robots haven't figured out yet.' (And don't go on about 3D printing please).

Biology can do a lot of heavy lifting for us. And it's not even illegal to clone (yet).

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the present. This IS indeed what happens. Combine teams go across the US Midwest harvesting wheat and corn. Migrant, err, undocumented, er, Mexican rapists and criminals come up from Mexico seasonally to pick those crops that $100,000 machines can't (the opposable thumb wins again!).

The only thing you got wrong was the housing aspect. The migrant workers still living in tents and the combine operators, as far as I can tell, live in their campers.

As FFF points out, farming - at least in industrialized countries - IS already automated. Drive through Kansas, Iowa, OK, most parts of Texas (if you have a couple of extra months), Idaho, etc. You'll see more machinery than people everywhere except on the main drag.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they absolutely do know enough about farming to know that modifying the farm to fit how machines work is going to be far easier than modifying machines to fit how farms work. That comment about cars vs. trains was an analogy to illustrate their point.

Re:No

[LynnwoodRooster]

It will end up along the lines of automated manufacturing. Ninety nine percent of the time the automation is fine, you only need a few people to oversee hundreds of machines doing their work. The other 1% of the time something goes wrong and you only need a few people to fix the issue. No factory is completely automated, but once it reaches a certain level (90% or more, typically) it's considered "fully automated". A few people feed and oversee hundreds of machines, which replaces thousands of workers.

Re: No

[Areyoukiddingme]

Take a potato harvester it does a fairly good job of picking up potatoes but it also picks up mud and rocks there is usually a team of around 4 people riding on the back pulling off mud and rocks to avoid carrying half the field back to the sheds then the crates filled on the field go on to a grader which sizes the potatos and again there is a team of people removing more mud and rocks. you can't automate that.

Used to be. Many forms of automation in past decades have depended on physics to do discrimination jobs. For instance, (and topically), ripeness of cranberries is established with a bounce test. An overripe berry doesn't bounce high enough, and is therefore physically rejected. More commonly, (and without the holiday tie-in), everything that happens inside a combine harvester of grain is based on physics. Wheat and chaff are separated by exploiting their physical differences. Same for corn and husk. But a potato and a rock the right size are harder to distinguish physically without an unacceptably high rate of potato destruction.

We've pretty much reached the limit of easily exploited physical differences like that, so we're now using more and more processing power instead. Your crisp processing machine already contains the leading edge of that, using a color sensor to detect burnt crisps. The machine that can distinguish between a clod of dirt and a potato will contain a neural network trained to the task. The hardware required to efficiently train such a large neural network and the hardware required to successfully execute such a large neural network has finally been commoditized. A LOT of things are going to change because of that. Machine discrimination is entering a whole new era which was formerly the exclusive domain of humans.

Very hard for a machine to identify a nettle from a lettuce someones got to pick that out. As my old mam used to say the cheapest robot is the human being.

Used to be. Not anymore.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes

Re: No

[tigersha]

I guarantee you Ethiopia is not going to be automated soon, infrastructure not there. Secondly, they eat most of what they produce so it does not matter.

Re: No

[tigersha]

Yes. My mother-in-law has a small vineyard and all the other farmers around her use grape oucking machines. She is a luddite and does it all by hand.

The grape picking machine works ok but the juice is more watery and fetches less at market (they are paid by grape sugar content). As some above said, nature is unpredictable, my m-i-l does not pick grapes after a rainstorm because of the water-fetches-less reason

Re:No

[lsatenstein]

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.

We are on to our second woodpecker.
If we can't increase food production, then we need birth control (i.e not more than 2 children per family). Tough luck if twins or triplets are born.

And if that is not good enough, we need to prune humans from the earth. I would keep the dumbest, and eliminate the smartest humans.

Re:No

[Z00L00K]

It probably ran away for a greener pasture somewhere.

Of Course.

[0100010001010011]

It's history has been.

From the first farmer to invent something to do more work with less they've been 'automating' it away in bits and pieces for hundreds of years.

Re:Of Course.

[Sique]

Automating tasks in farming got us the agricultural revolution necessary for the industrialization to begin with. Without automatized farming, 90% of the population would still be needed to feed us all.

Re:Of Course.

[Ol Olsoc]

It's history has been.

From the first farmer to invent something to do more work with less they've been 'automating' it away in bits and pieces for hundreds of years.

If we take it way back, the very first "farmers" replaced foraging with their ultra simple technology. That put a lot of people out of work, taking their foraging jerbs.

It also paved the way for civilization, as it freed people for other things than just finding enough food to survive.

I'm in a marked minority here, but I expect that after the expected social upheaval, there will be net gains for humanity after the dust settles, assuming we don't decide to commit speciecide. I'm at about 60/40 that we'll kill ourselves at the moment. But if we don't, it will be a marked improvement for humanity.

Re:Of Course.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

"assuming we don't decide to commit speciecide."

Too late, that started in 1973 and is accelerating.

Re:Of Course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider the last few generations:

My grandparents generation: farms were small and employed multiple people to run, many staying on farm (including my grandparents).
My parents generation: bigger farms employ the contractors for harvesting, shearing and other "big" jobs but most other jobs automated away (big motorised harvesters etc, better land management etc).
My generation: even bigger farms employ even fewer people. UAVs used to assess crops, data analytics automating application of fertiliser and pest control, fully automatic irrigation (in areas that do same) etc.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if this process continues to its logical conclusion. Which is actually sad: not everyone wants to move to big cities for work - some people really enjoy the rural life and will be deeply unhappy when this happens. Personally I would rather a future that moved more in the reverse direction, but that would require a substantial rethink of our base economy and a willingness to shrink our population for a few generations, which seems sadly unlikely to occur.

Re: Of Course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that when you were born or something?

Re: Of Course.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

You really don't understand the reference? Roe V. Wade, when the United States embarked on genocide.

Counterpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re: Counterpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

You win.

Re: Counterpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

No he doesn't.

Re: Counterpoint

[K. S. Kyosuke]

One pound for a five minute argument, please.

Re: Counterpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe?

Re: Counterpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely Yes

Re: Counterpoint

[Locke2005]

"I didn't come here for an argument!"

Re: Counterpoint

[h33t l4x0r]

I'm sorry, the five minutes is up.

Re: Counterpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

OP here. I admit defeat.

Re:Counterpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

Jane, you ignorant slut. . . merely because farmers are roboticizing their fields, is no reason for single women to take robot lovers. . .

Re: Counterpoint

[stealth_finger]

Oh Reginald........I DISAGREE

Re: Counterpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

No it will not. Maybe later though.

Re: Counterpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

No you're not and no you didn't

Sure, why not?

[Ramze]

With the upcoming AI/robotic revolution, the relevant question would be - what won't be fully automated?

Re: Sure, why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mom.

Re: Sure, why not?

[Locke2005]

Alas, your mom will still suffer from The Tragedy of the Commons...

Re: Sure, why not?

[tehcyder]

Best. Mod. Evar.

Re:Sure, why not?

[Carewolf]

With the upcoming AI/robotic revolution, the relevant question would be - what won't be fully automated?

What would the robot overlords need farms for?

Just remember one thing

[atomlib]

Just remember one thing: plants crave for electrolytes.

Re: Just remember one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

...which they don't get from drinking water like from a toilet. I ain't seen no plant growing in no toilet.

  Brando's got electrolytes.

Re:Just remember one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember one thing: plants crave for electrolytes.

Camacho 2016

Oh wait, Idiocracy wasn't supposed to be a made-for-TV documentary...

Re:Just remember one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

But Camacho was more intelligent than all the other occupants of that particular white house and that government. He actually got the idea, that something was really bad ...

Re: Just remember one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Brawndo you fucking tool.

Re: Just remember one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, if he's so smart, whycome he don't know that?

Obvious way forward is obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Farming is not immune to the onslaught of robots and technology, and has been moving towards automation at a fairly rapid pace.

One of the dirty secrets of agricultural farming - at least in New Zealand, where I am from, is that the pay is well less then minimum wage and is still a huge cost to the farmer - which is due, in part, to how repetitive the work is. Anything that is repetitive can be automated.

One of the many challenges being tackled is AI - ie finding exactly where the fruit, bugs etc are and eliminating them. Also, have a look at Farmbot.io (not associated with it in any way) - no reason this technology can't scale and be adapted even wider - and this is just one of many.

Re:Obvious way forward is obvious

[0100010001010011]

Farmbot.io

This is a product designed by people that have never farmed before and stupid expensive for what it is.

Farmers don't need a 4x8 CNC machine. They need a little Wall-E robot to go out in the field and do work. I don't care if my field takes 48 hours to till as long as it takes 0 hours of my time. Let it run 24/7 planting and weeding. And it should be able to cost less than what a CNC machine does. (Plants don't need 0.2mm resolution).

Re:Obvious way forward is obvious

[scdeimos]

Farmbot.io is cute for backyard gardens and indoor drug labs but it doesn't scale to the tens/hundreds of acres/hectares that commercial farms typically cover. I'd expect to see something like farmbot's tool rigs getting dragged along behind automated tractors like a modern version of a plough.

Re: Obvious way forward is obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Minimum wage is not minimum?

Re:Obvious way forward is obvious

[Mashiki]

Considering you can set your tractor to "auto drive" with some of the more expensive version along with your fertilizing and planting equipment completely? This revolution is already here. Pretty much every tractor out there has GPS built in these days to allow you to program everything in. Hell, a buddy of mine who owns a cattle farm(milk), doesn't even go out and deal with milking his cows anymore. It's all automated. The only time he even has to worry about it, is when the milker can't find the teats but that maybe happens one every 2-3 days. He's got around 1500 head, so it was a tedious chore before. You can even get equipment to do automatic vaccinations(as they come in for milking) and booster shots for your cattle, and everything from robot controlled egg immunization for chickens and turkeys and egg selection for breeding.

Re:Obvious way forward is obvious

[Ol Olsoc]

Hell, a buddy of mine who owns a cattle farm(milk), doesn't even go out and deal with milking his cows anymore. It's all automated. The only time he even has to worry about it, is when the milker can't find the teats but that maybe happens one every 2-3 days.

Wife and I were watching a show on an automated milking farm, and its nothing short of incredible. We were both fascinated by the fact that the cows would come in for milking several times a day as they saw fit. The level of care for the animals was also evident. These were seriously happy moocows.

Then she turned to me and asked "The cows voluntarily come in to get milked, and they use the machines way more often than by the older methods, so they enjoy it. I wonder what vegans would have to say to that?

Re: Obvious way forward is obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Then she turned to me and asked "The cows voluntarily come in to get milked, and they use the machines way more often than by the older methods, so they enjoy it. I wonder what vegans would have to say to that?

That lactose intolerance is still a problem, that dairy products have a lot of other issues, and that human beings can be influenced by pleasure stimuli too, that doesn't make it a good and desirable state, it just reflects how our brains and bodies work much like other animals. People hurt themselves with sex all the time. Even just chafing.

Bet you they don't show you that.

Re: Obvious way forward is obvious

[Ol Olsoc]

People hurt themselves with sex all the time. Even just chafing.

Bet you they don't show you that.

Rule 34 says you are wrong. I'm not going to look it up tho'

Define "Fully" automated

[guruevi]

Yes, off course it will continue to be automated. The question is, at what point is it 'fully automated' and at what point is our entire food chain being run by a singularity (is there a difference?). People will continue to be necessary (at least for the foreseeable time) to fix the machines and make it do things.

Farms are no longer being run by 'stupid farmers' with their farmhands and maids, even a smallish sized farm (in developed countries at least) these days requires agricultural, mechanical, electrical and computer engineers. Even fruit farms (apple farms etc) genetically engineer their trees to be smaller and lower to the ground so they're easier to pick mechanically.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Dutch Gun]

The question is, at what point is it 'fully automated' and at what point is our entire food chain being run by a singularity (is there a difference?).

Yes, I think there's a difference. You need a lot of advanced robotics and mechanical systems in place, but the control mechanisms don't need to be "intelligent" (if that's what you mean by a "singularity"). They just need to know enough to run the machines and tend to the crops. Those systems will be very specialized, and will in turn need human specialists to manage them. And when those systems need maintenance or repairing, it's still going to be a person that does it, albeit with a lot of sophisticated hardware and software at their disposal.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[rtb61]

Will anything happen in the future, given enough future sure. So how far forward do they want to go, logically the growing and harvesting of fully genetically modified algae. Don't even think about soylent green, fully customised super foods, high in required trace elements, very low in allergens and designer made to suit taste and texture requirements, any combination they can imagine, hmm, fruity strawberry steaks, banana custard melons, fresh mint chocolate milk from the vine. Eating a dead animal, with possible disease vectors and production contamination, will just be so 'offal' (better to feed ground up dead animals to the algae than risk food poisoning or disease, plus completely lacking in essential trace elements and flavour, just eww, hey I'll eat it now but given the choice would I eat it in the future when so many far better choices will become available, should I live that long, no absolutely not).

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Maxo-Texas]

People are not required to fix machines now.

We rarely fix machines any more.

Machines are not built to be fixed. They are built to be replaced.

Quality machines are built to be modularly replaced which is trivial.

Given a robotic truck, robotic forklift, and a good SLA, humans are optional and likely to be remote observation at best.
---

Design new machines yes-- but that's 2 to even 3 orders of magnitude lower labor requirements.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[AmiMoJo]

People will want to do those jobs, rather than have them automated. Eventually we will get to the point where most people don't have to work, but do so voluntarily just to fill their time. In fact you can already buy games like Farming Simulator.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Sique]

Even fruit farms (apple farms etc) genetically engineer their trees to be smaller and lower to the ground so they're easier to pick mechanically.

You don't genetically engineer apple trees for that. You just cut them at the desired height, and you bind the branches along steel struts or other structures. That's something farmers do since at least 2500 years.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

"They just need to know enough to run the machines and tend to the crops."

And what better way to learn about tending crops than by networking them all and seeing what strategies work best in given soil conditions, etc.? Perhaps they could all be in a Facebook group or something. Then the Benevolent One can save the world from itself by deciding that your town's Instagram selfies are looking a bit plump lately - or that those pesky red states don't *really* need to eat....

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[ChromeAeonium]

It's (kind of) both. It is true that a lot of pruning and training goes into getting fruit trees to be the desired shape, but there is also a genetic component. Trees which have been bred to be short (and usually also cold tolerant & disease resistant) are used as rootstocks for a lot of fruit trees, with the above ground portion that produces the fruit being grafted onto those roots. The end result is dwarf trees that are easier to work with. True, this isn't genetic engineering, but it is a bit more than just pruning.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

You in fact graft the crop species on to a dwarf variety root stock .

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[ishmaelflood]

Can I perhaps guess you haven't worked on a real farm for a full week? Every single manual task is designed to be the limit for a healthy person, for example grain is hefted in 50 kg (112 lb) sacks. How many 50 kg sacks can you shift in a day? great cos that is your job. Those neat little straw bales are about 15 kg (33lb), you need to stack 40 of those so the hydraulic clamp can pick them up. Now there are some reasonably cruisy bits, sitting in a tractor listening to the radio while ploughing or whatever. That is of course the easiest job to automate.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[AmiMoJo]

People would let machines do the hard manual labour, leaving the fun stuff to themselves. People do things like fruit picking as a leisure activity already.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[BlueStrat]

They just need to know enough to run the machines and tend to the crops.

Farming encompasses a lot more than crops of various fruits, plants, and trees.

Cows (meat & milk). Pigs. Chickens (meat & eggs).

Chickens may not be that big a problem, but cows and pigs are relatively intelligent (for farm animals, especially pigs) and even have emotions. Farmers often must 'comfort' a cow when giving birth, sometimes pigs as well. I don't think 'farmbot' will 'comfort' them much, likely the opposite.

Animals are also surprisingly adept at finding places to escape or otherwise get into places they shouldn't be. Animals can be unpredictable, something machines are not good at...adapting to unpredictable new situations, circumstances, and conditions.

I can see automation of growing/harvesting field crops occurring even now, but meat & dairy animals pose a whole different and much more complex set of requirements and will require much more sophisticated systems. I think a partial-automation is all that can be achieved in the near future regarding food-animals, full automation may be quite a ways down the timeline.

Strat

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[bytesex]

Hm... maids...

Re: Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you need a farming simulator when you have farmville for free?

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Rei]

I don't know, I watched a neighbor help birth a lamb. It wasn't so much "comforting" as it was "grabbing and pulling".

It'd be neat to see if drones start taking more of a role in roundups as they get cheaper and flight times longer. The annual sheep roundups here are big events involving tons of people going through the mountains looking for sheep, then surrounding them and driving them back. On the other hand, I don't think people would want it to become too automated; they're big community events, an annual tradition. I doubt anyone would object to the use of drones to find sheep, but outsourcing the roundup to them entirely might be a step too far.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

Rarely fix machines now? You obviously have never spent any time on a farm. Farm equipment is expensive, farmers will fix and fix and jury-rig a piece of equipment as long as possible to get as much use as possible out of it before they have to buy a new one.

You do not simply replace a 1 million dollar+ Combine just because it broke down.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Rei]

Part of the problem with algae farming for food is the same as for fuel: infrastructure costs. Crops, you just plant them in soil. Algae farms require tanks. 100% perfectly enclosed and monitored tanks if you want them to remain that perfectly engineered single-species type that gives you your optimal food production.

Algae also has a lot of water to drive off. Getting rid of water is a big expense even for crops that aren't grown literally swimming around in it. For example, field corn.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Rei]

Do you still use hand-sized bales of hay over there? Here in Iceland at least all hay production I've ever encountered is fully automated and makes these huge wrapped bales that you have to use trucks to haul around.

Re: Define "Fully" automated

[Bonobo_Unknown]

I think the bigger question is what value does a human have beyond their utility and what will they do when they don't need to do anything.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Dutch Gun]

The dairy industry is already highly automated. The modern cow carousel was originally designed in the 1930s, so this isn't anything new. Nowadays, with robotics systems, you don't even need humans to hook the cows up for milking.

So, while I agree that managing animals will always require some human interaction and supervision, the day to day operations are becoming more and more automated. It's no different than other farming operations, letting fewer farmers produce more for less.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[tehcyder]

Can I perhaps guess you haven't worked on a real farm for a full week? Every single manual task is designed to be the limit for a healthy person, for example grain is hefted in 50 kg (112 lb) sacks. How many 50 kg sacks can you shift in a day? great cos that is your job. Those neat little straw bales are about 15 kg (33lb), you need to stack 40 of those so the hydraulic clamp can pick them up. Now there are some reasonably cruisy bits, sitting in a tractor listening to the radio while ploughing or whatever. That is of course the easiest job to automate.

People pay good money to go to the gym to shift heavy weights around. As long as there were reasonable health and safety precautions, I can imagine people happily volunteering to do a few hours of manual labour outside in the fresh air instead.

And if you're not a weightlifter type, half a day walking around herding sheep or whatever is more fun that slogging it out on an indoor treadmill.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

We use both, but mostly large cylindrical bales. The small baling machines may be 50 years old, but if they still work, they still get used.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[hipp5]

That assumes we're going to be farming animals in the future. Researchers are working on "growing" meat from stem cells. If they get to the point where it's scalable, I imagine we'll transition quickly to such an approach. Why feed a whole cow when you can just feed the steak?

Re: Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

As pruning goes, grafting is really just pruning and tying pieces together. Add a little string, creosote and burlap.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Ol Olsoc]

Farms are no longer being run by 'stupid farmers' with their farmhands and maids, even a smallish sized farm (in developed countries at least) these days requires agricultural, mechanical, electrical and computer engineers.

I only met one "stupid" farmer, and he was doing a rent-a-farm job in the '70's. And even he could learn. Most of the rest of them are shockingly adroit, and in many fields (pun intended).

Even fruit farms (apple farms etc) genetically engineer their trees to be smaller and lower to the ground so they're easier to pick mechanically.

One thing that makes life a lot easier for farmers is there are new varieties of crops that come into harvest at different dates, so its not an insane dash when the crops come in.

I helped at a friend's farm in the early 70's before a lot of this genetic improvement, and harvest time was brutal.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[WorBlux]

You are both wrong. The heights of apple trees are controlled largely by the root-stock they are grafted on. Commercial apples genetic potential is actually rather quite tall. It is not the result of intentional genetic manipulation, but intentional chimerazation. (making of a chimera), which is in some ways weirder and stranger. Aggressive pruning doesn't control height that well because trees, will respond through more vigorous vegetation growth the next year due to an deficit of auxins, especially tendiing to induce water sproutsin apple species, which weaken the structural integrity of the tree, and if not managed (management sometimes induces the same response all over again), then airflow in the canopy in inhibited and fungal pathogens become more of a problem.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the threads above about automatic cow milking. Then look up 'HappyCow" on YouTube (an automatic cow scratcher that looks like a giant automatic shoe cleaner).

Cows like machines.

They're cows....

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

Little bitty balers are niche machines now. There is a market for small bales - you don't want your 15 year old 4H club member trying to feed his prize cowlet with a half ton cylinder. Recreational horse owners also like them.

But for the bulk users, they have gone the way of the manual shifting tractor.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

Even fruit farms (apple farms etc) genetically engineer their trees to be smaller and lower to the ground so they're easier to pick mechanically.

You're dramatically overestimating the state of the art in genetic modification. It is true that fruit farms -prune- their trees to be smaller and lower to the ground so they're easier to pick mechanically.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

Genetic engineering for fruit trees? You mean grafting? That's been done for hundreds of years?

Source - grew up in the Willamette Valley, still only grafting going on that I see

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

Why reject the reality today continuing as an assumption and inject four new ones from sci-fi hopes? What sense led you to do that?

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Maxo-Texas]

I agree with your point that more expensive items are more likely to be repaired but an SLA swap out business model would be more appropriate to an automated model. It's been used for very expensive computers for over a decade. I.e. the machines are designed for human maintenance now because that's cheaper. But human maintenance is expensive and so it's a point of attack.

First with better diagnostics, the combine could tell the SLA service provider what part is broken before they leave the office. Also, the combine could detect and request service before things actually failed (computers have been doing that for a couple decades).
Second with better design, the major components would be modular and easy to maintain by a robot.

But I'll grant you automated repair and maintenance might be closer to 20 years away than to 10 years away but a leasing model where they pulled up and swapped out your combine with another and took it back to the factory for maintenance would be better than extended downtime.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[guruevi]

Not just pruning, grafting as well and recently, DNA testing before planting to make sure you get the desired shelf life, firmness etc with gene editing (CRISPR) already being developed commercially for certain crops and from what I hear, R&D startups are starting to work on gene editing for animal farms.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

You want mob graze meat if you want to stop desertification and sequester carbon.

http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change?language=en

You can automate moving the fences or moving the herd through paddocks. But the initial cost is high.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think they quite realize how much automation is already used. You can chain machines together and have them harvest/plant/fertilize the whole field with 1 guy in the cab taking a nap as the thing does its thing along a predefined GPS route.

The few things that are not done yet is delivery to silo and fixing things.

It *will* be fully automated.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll make two points. First more and more farming will be indoors rather than outdoors. If designing for automation indoors eliminates many variables. Everything is built with consideration of the machines in mind. Secondly agricultural waste and run off are a huge problem already and with indoor farming all run off can be eliminated. Next the incoming air and water quality can be controlled as well. These days the pollution from one farm can effect the neighboring farms and towns. The elimination of variables as well as a vast reduction in plant diseases as well as the cost of fertilizers and other chemicals make indoor farms a winner. Indoor fish farming is already a booming business. One can raise hot climate species anywhere on Earth. And with LED lighting crops can grow much faster than out of doors and farming can go on in all seasons.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[blindseer]

these huge wrapped bales that you have to use trucks to haul around.

Define "truck", is it this kind of truck?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This kind?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

From what I've seen in the US Midwest and Southeast the use of small bales hasn't completely went away. What is largely gone is a lot of the manhandling of them. Small balers will have "throwers" on them that will toss a bale from the baler onto a wagon that is much like an open top cage on wheels. When full the wagon is pulled to a storage shed, a side door opened, and the bales are pushed out the door (still by hand, I haven't seen this automated yet) onto a sort of catch pan. The pan has a conveyor belt in the middle that will carry the bales away, up into the shed, and a simple mechanism will drop them on to the floor, allowing them to pile up. There is some loss of the bales from broken strings due to the rather rough handling by the machines but the hay is just shoveled up and tossed to the animals (if near a feed pen), back in the baler (if lost near the field), or left to rot (if it's just too far to bother).

These storage sheds are usually placed very close to where the bales are needed. The bales are often just tossed out a door by hand to get to the animals. If moved any distance they'd be hauled by a vehicle suited for the volume carried and distance traveled. The use of small bales usually implies a need for small amounts moved short distances. This means using a common pickup truck, small off road vehicle, or a tractor with a wagon, end loader, or some sort of bale fork on the 3 point implement attachment.

Re:Define "Fully" automated

[blindseer]

After thinking about my last post I thought about how the handling of the small bales after harvest must have changed since I last worked on the farm. A bit of internet searching revealed a new kind of automation, the "bale wagon".

A bale wagon is apparently a towed or self propelled device that will pick up small square bales, stack them nicely on a platform on the rear of the device, and then nicely lower this stack where desired. The smaller bales will be picked up by a small "scoop" and the operator has to merely drive alongside a row of these in the field after a baler has deposited them on the ground. Larger square bales require the operator to stop and use an articulated arm to pick up the bale and lower it to the rear platform.

I've seen these bale movers on farms that will hook into a layer of bales that is 2 wide and 4 deep, lift them up into the hay loft, and lower them to the loft floor. This used to require people to stack the bales on a wagon, and then someone in the loft to stack them again once lowered from the bale mover. These bale movers are very old technology, they used to be powered by horses. Now people will use a motor and winch, or just hook an ATV or small tractor to where the horses would have been hitched.

Using a bale wagon and those old bale movers sounds better than the process I described earlier. I can imagine fewer bales lost and more consistent product since they are stacked nicely rather than tossed on a big messy pile.

Also these "bale wagons" are just the latest evolution in this technology. The bale cages on wheels have evolved a bit too. The bale throwers can toss a bale into the bale cage in a big pile and when full the cage does not necessarily have to be emptied by hand. What some of these wagons can do is open up in the back and have a hydraulic ram lift up the front to dump out the load of bales. Somewhere in between the two someone figured out how to have the bales get stacked nicely on the wagon so that the dumping of the bales is a stack instead of a pile.

More "Fake" News

[STRICQ]

It's fake news that farming yields will drop. With CO2 rising (naturally) plants will begin to yield more and more returns. This is actually already happening.

Re:More "Fake" News

[mlawrence]

While that may be true, the rise in CO2 will also cause more severe weather, which will destroy more crops.

Re:More "Fake" News

[STRICQ]

While that may be true, the rise in CO2 will also cause more severe weather, which will destroy more crops.

That also is more fake news. There is no evidence for more severe weather. We are in a drought of tornadoes and major hurricanes.

Re:More "Fake" News

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, higher temperatures meaning higher dew point and more evaporation which leads to a net increase in precipitation.

Re:More "Fake" News

[STRICQ]

Also, higher temperatures meaning higher dew point and more evaporation which leads to a net increase in precipitation.

This is also a good thing. Since the net increase in temperature from a higher CO2 will be small, a max increase a good bit less than 2C (estimated to be about 1.6C on the high side of the range), food production will increase. There is nothing bad from rising CO2. The Earth and all its residents benefit most from about 1200ppm. We have about 800ppm left to go.

Re:More "Fake" News

[dbIII]

The constraint is artificial fertilizer. Without cheap and easy to obtain hydrocarbons we are fucked as things currently stand. There is a lot of gas around and it's easier to use to make ammonia than oil but temporary supply issues can mess things around.

Re:More "Fake" News

[Maxo-Texas]

The bigger hit is without a cold winter, pests survive and are ready to hit the plants immediately. We are already seeing this with tomotoes in the southern USA where we used to get 3-12 days of 20 degree temperatures every year. We haven't had freezing temperatures for more than a couple days in a decade where i live. The last good snow was almost 20 years ago now (used to snow once every 8-10 years).

Re: More "Fake" News

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how the recent stories about fake news have allowed just about any half assed retarded armchair commentator to declare anything to be fake news even when that thing is supported by science and statistics which go back decades.

That weather patterns have departed from historical norms by a very large margin in the last decade or so is completely beyond question. Or at least, it is beyond question for people who have a half a brain and are willing to read halfway through one peer reviewed article on the matter.

Re:More "Fake" News

[Rei]

Higher temperatures do indeed lead to a greater total increase in precipitation, but it's not necessarily a good thing, for a number of reasons.

1) Monsoon belts move further north; precipitation amounts tend to polarize between seasons.
2) Snowpack accumulates less (fewer below-freezing days offsetting the more intense snow events) and melts sooner. It's snowpack that modulates many important river flows, and thus off-season water supplies.
3) Higher evaporation rates dessicate soil and plants faster.
4) Precipitation doesn't tend to come in more frequent rain events, but rather more intense rain events. Which are often damaging in their own right.

A warm world means more overall precipitation, and more flood events, but also more drought events. That said, there's a very strong spatial component; not all parts of the world change evenly.

Re:More "Fake" News

[Muros]

It's fake news that farming yields will drop. With CO2 rising (naturally) plants will begin to yield more and more returns. This is actually already happening.

With CO2 rising, photosynthesis in plants increases, resulting in higher yields of sugars and starches. It also requires less water, so crop production in areas that require irrigation will need less water. The flip side, however, is that you get less proteins & minerals in the plants. In addition to that, land that does not require irrigation, which is often much more fertile, will have less evaporation from plants and thus have greater run-off, which can speed up nutrient leaching and soil erosion.

Re: More "Fake" News

[Anonymous Coward]

More fake news, everyone knows the great spaghetti monster controls all of the weather with his noodly appendages.

Yes

[rgbe]

And there is the opensource https://farmbot.io/

Re:Yes

[Maxo-Texas]

Several fruits and vegetables have market ready robotic solutions now.

They are cheaper than 3rd world labor so even if willing a human literally couldn't make enough to eat for a month's labor much less house and cloth themselves.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish that could be more cheaply automated with a mulch cover and a watering timer.

Yes, eventually

[gweihir]

But with the current state of robotics, primarily on the software side, that is not going to happen in the next few decades. Software still mostly sucks at elementary tasks, complex planning tasks like running a farm on both the microscopic and the macroscopic level are wayyyy out of reach at this time. Eventually, all these tasks will be within reach though, and then automation will become cheaper and, more importantly, far more effective than human beings. I think we might see working demonstrations (typically 20-50 before mainstream adoption) in as little as 30-50 years.

Re:Yes, eventually

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we might see working demonstrations (typically 20-50 before mainstream adoption) in as little as 30-50 years.

Let Me Read The Fuckin Summary For You

And in Japan, the world's first entirely automated lettuce farm is due for launch next year.

Re:Yes, eventually

[gweihir]

And if you had any clue what you are talking about, you would know that farming lettuce in a clean-room is not "farming".

Re:Yes, eventually

[Sique]

And 200 years ago, some wisehead would have told you that plowing an acre with a steam plow is not "plowing".

Re:Yes, eventually

[gweihir]

Seriously? You cannot distinguish a sterile lab-setting scaled-up from an open-field one? That is pathetic.

Re:Yes, eventually

[tehcyder]

And 200 years ago, some wisehead would have told you that plowing an acre with a steam plow is not "plowing".

No, if they'd never seen a steam plough they might not have thought it possible, but if they saw it plough a field with their own eyes, they'd definitely say it was ploughing.

Whereas growing some lettuces in a greenhouse is only farming in the sense that my cat playing with a rubber ball is professional tennis.

Re:Yes, eventually

[jabuzz]

Right because growing lettuces in a greenhouse is not farming. There are thousands of hectares in the UK that are "under glass" right now growing crops that are consumed by humans and the amount of land that is "under glass" has been expanding rapidly over recent years.

Note "under glass" also includes plastic, and is used to indicate a more controlled environment than an open field.

Re:Yes, eventually

[Sique]

The first steam powered ploughs were introduced in the early 18th century. They were stationary steam engines with long steel ropes, and they were put on different sides of the field and pulling the ploughs along the steel rope between them. This is now roughly 200 years ago.

Re:Yes, eventually

[Sique]

Early 19th century. My bad. Otherwise it would have been 300 years ago. Time flies.

Re:Yes, eventually

[0100010001010011]

It doesn't matter. Farming is a black box to most people. The question most care about is "Can I eat it"?

Yes

[ChromeAeonium]

The ultimate thing about farming is that it is not easy. Harvesting of fruits and vegetables, in particular, is long, hard, laborious work. As economies develop, there's going to be less people wanting to do that for the prices consumers want to pay. Mechanized harvesting is already employed in a lot of agronomic crops (corn, rice, wheat, soy, ect) and some horticultural crops. The difficulty is going to be getting machines that are able to tell when to pick, how to pick, and how to avoid damaging the crop. Some things might still have to be done by hand (pruning of tree fruit, which is an art and a science, comes to mind), but in general, mechanized agriculture will be the future, and I think that's a good thing.

Stop eating cows...

[mspohr]

If we stopped eating cows, we could feed 10x the population on the crops we raise now.
You could think of the cow as a very inefficient robot for turning corn into meat.
www.cowspiracy.com

Re:Stop eating cows...

[camperdave]

We can already feed more than 1x the population on the crops we raise now. Why sacrifice cows for the purpose of raising more humans?

Re:Stop eating cows...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about being the first example and go ahead and eat the stuff we feed to cows? Share and enjoy!

Re: Stop eating cows...

[mspohr]

? Because humans are more valuable than cows?

Re:Stop eating cows...

[pD-brane]

I agree. With the goal of feeding the global human population in the future (as stated in the article) we need to become much more efficient. Automation will happen, but its importance is very small compared to what we gain from stopping or reducing meat consumption.

I grew up on a dairy farm, I'm a vegetarian and a climatologist.

Re:Stop eating cows...

[BlueStrat]

I agree. With the goal of feeding the global human population in the future (as stated in the article) we need to become much more efficient. Automation will happen, but its importance is very small compared to what we gain from stopping or reducing meat consumption.

I grew up on a dairy farm, I'm a vegetarian and a climatologist.

It may be scientifically, economically, and otherwise sensible.

But people won't stop eating meat. Sorry, won't happen.

There's ~10,000 years of positive genetic selection for meat-eating humans. We are omnivorous. Meat tastes *good* to people. It won't stop tasting good any time in the foreseeable future. As long as that's true people will seek meat as a food regardless of any laws, rules, or regulations. They won't settle for artificial even if you prove scientifically there's no difference. People will still believe 'natural' meat tastes and is better. Outlaw meat and you will see a black market and organized crime to support it in hyperdrive.

Strat

Re:Stop eating cows...

[Rei]

The Indian subcontinent begs to differ.

You tend to crave certain meat dishes because your body has learned to associate them with feelings of fullness and having its nutritional needs met. When a person goes vegetarian, the cravings continue... for a couple weeks. Then they disappear, as your body learns to associate other dishes with the same thing.

This is from personal experience.

Re:Stop eating cows...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Indian subcontinent begs to differ.

You tend to crave certain meat dishes because your body has learned to associate them with feelings of fullness and having its nutritional needs met. When a person goes vegetarian, the cravings continue... for a couple weeks. Then they disappear, as your body learns to associate other dishes with the same thing.

This is from personal experience.

Irrelevant.

You don't have the right to tell someone they're not supposed to eat meat.

That's not fully accurate, though. To be completely accurate, you do have the right to tell them - and then they have the right to tell you to fuck off.

Re:Stop eating cows...

[Rei]

That would be a nice reply if I had actually told anyone that they're not supposed to eat meat.

What does "supposed to eat" even mean?

Re:Stop eating cows...

[Anonymous Coward]

Energy bars are full of it. In the earlier times, at the beginning of the previous century cows were grazing in the wood lands, keeping the forests in good shape. Some insect species are getting very rare due to the cow manure missing from the forest floor. The herds were much smaller, though, and the meat of such cows would probably cost ten times the price of today.

Re: Stop eating cows...

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if they produce more than they consume. //GLMDesigns

Re:Stop eating cows...

[dbIII]

Hey Mr Anarchist you forgot almost the entire human population of the planet that eat meat in small amounts or not at all.
That society you want to overthrow is about the only one properous enough that most people can eat a lot of meat.

Re: Stop eating cows...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont particularly want more humans around, most of us are aholes.

Re: Stop eating cows...

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation needed.

And I mean it.

Re:Stop eating cows...

[LifesABeach]

Your teeth say you will eat the cow and digest it.

Re:Stop eating cows...

[mspohr]

There is no genetic predisposition or "need" for any particular type of food. Humans are omnivores. They eat whatever food is available.
Food preferences are usually cultural. If your mother served you cows, you'll keep eating cows.
However, you do have a choice.
Cows: Bad for your health; Bad for the environment; Bad for the animal
www.cowspiracy.com

It is already fully automated

[roman_mir]

Yes but farming is already pretty much fully automated. A few people can run gigantic farms today already with the machinery that they have, in the near future the machinery will become more and more autonomous, allowing the same few farmers to run larger and larger farms.

Step 2

[burtosis]

Convert the technology to 3D stacked compact hydroponic indoor units powered by fusion reactors 24/7 and stack them up to 3 miles deep. Keep the worlds farm acreage and get 5,000-10,000x or more the food supply. Boost the cities into uninhabited areas not farmed with densities greater than New York or Tokyo.

Step 3
Boost the worlds population to 40 trillion.

Really is the only hope

[ThatsNotPudding]

Truckers first, farmers second. Accelerated de-population of red states might stave off the planned dystopia.

Re:Really is the only hope

[Anonymous Coward]

So technology really will save the planet, by killing off the conservatives.

Re:Really is the only hope

[Tablizer]

No, they'll get gov't handouts, yet STILL complain about "Big Gov't"

Re:Really is the only hope

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they'll get gov't handouts, yet STILL complain about "Big Gov't"

So no real change then.

Re:Really is the only hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Truckers first, farmers second. Accelerated de-population of red states might stave off the planned dystopia.

Dystopia tend to be "progressive".

See: Venezuela. Detroit. Baltimore. All run by leftists/Socialists/Democrats.

Re:Really is the only hope

[GLMDesigns]

So. Then. Change the game. Don't have the federal government give hand outs. Have welfare and support taxes come solely from the states. That way the Blue States won't be subsidizing the Red State. Soon enough Red Staters will see the error of their way that all of America will turn blue.

At least if your assumptions hold true.

So. If you truly believe what you just wrote start pushing to have all welfare and subsidies be provided by the states themselves - and in a few short years ... your dream of a blue america will be realized.

Re: Really is the only hope

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think so. The only way blue states subsidize red states now is in the sense of infrastructure, particularly interstate highways. Those have always been the property of the federal government anyways, and only exist to move military from place to place in an emergency. If every state just paid for its own stuff, like little countries with only a loose affiliation with the federal government, I think the red states would actually do just fine. There's less money coming in but also much less cost. In fact, if you asked any conservative red stater, they would almost unanimously agree this is what they want anyways. I live in a conservative area of a blue state, and everyone here always wishes we could just become a separate state from the (extremely geographically small) blue area that dictates policy to the state currently. Our taxes get spent fixing aging infrastructure in the metro area, paying for them to have public transportation that doesn't come to our area, and dumping money into their failing schools where teachers go on strike every few years asking for 50% increases in pay so they can afford to live in the city where they work, and otherwise NOT being spent where it comes from, because we're just a bunch of dumb farmers and hicks who can't see the benefit of the wisdom of taking all our wealth and moving it to the city. Meanwhile our schools operate in the black, the roads we pay for are well taken care of, the farm land that generates most of the wealth continues to pump out more and more food/fuel than ever, and people are happy as long as they can stay away from the city.

Everything must be automated

[execthis]

Everything must be automated and ALL illegals deported. No welfare for flunkies and dropouts. Only those smart enough to program and maintain the machines selected to survive.

Re:Everything must be automated

[lxs]

Why bother?
Invent a robot to program and maintain the machines and we can get rid of the last of the pesky humans.

Re:Everything must be automated

[Anonymous Coward]

Robotic farm machines reminds me... Does anyone else remember Brian W. Aldiss's classic 1958 science fiction story, "But who can replace a man?"

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?68462
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q="but+who+can+replace+a+man%3F"

Re:Everything must be automated

[Cryacin]

Yeah, and what robots are going to repair the repair robots?

And don't tell me it's turtles all the way down. Eventually you hit tortoise and a SVN repository.

Re: Everything must be automated

[Anonymous Coward]

Who looks after the doctors ?

Re: Everything must be automated

[Anonymous Coward]

Robot repair apps, of course. You should fund a robot repair app on Kickstarter now.

Didn't read it but no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Been a farmer. Nothing ever works right. Everything requires constant attention. Sure there may be less dumb labor but you will always need a farmer. On a side note don't buy a new tractor. The last thing you need is your tool shutting down because of a sensor reporting an error. Honestly I don't give a fuck if I smoke the clutch as a disposable part to finish a weather limited job. So fuck you programmers unless you have done a job yourself don't think you know all the answers. Also fuck you manegment for trying to diversify your monetization on maintenance for an industrial machine.

In the future

[the_Bionic_lemming]

In the future many food items will be vat created. Genetic research will allow for cell replication on a mesh to provide all sorts of protein.

Vegetables will be grown similarly, and be shaped into whatever forms that are palatable for the consumer.

Eventually, that will be replaced by the ability to create things on the atomic scale - at which point the whole mesh tech will be tossed out.

In our lifetimes, there are still going to be farmers and laborers. Because there is still a real world out there. One that the popular press seems to avoid noticing.

Crop spraying by UAVs (drones)

[Max_W]

It exists already. It costs much less than if done by a manned aircraft, it's more precise, done at a lesser altitude. And it produces less toxic exhaust, less noise which harms birds, bees, and other wild life.

An UAV can fly fully automated above fields. And if fluids are manufactured in containers, even refilling can be easily automated, reducing an operator's exposure to zero. Let alone that UAV can supply remote farms with necessities.

I hope that the new administration will remove as it had promised "the layers upon layers upon layers of regulations", and this new technology will be explored and used in the filed.

Re:Crop spraying by UAVs (drones)

[Locke2005]

I don't want the drones to spray chemicals, I want swarms of them to squash the bugs and pull the weeds out one by one! The only thing we should be spraying on fields is fertilizer!

Re:Crop spraying by UAVs (drones)

[Max_W]

I did not mean spaying with chemicals. There is already spraying with ecological bio substances. But it still requires spaying anyway.

Re:Crop spraying by UAVs (drones)

[Dr. Spork]

Yes, exactly. It won't be long before we have cheap robots that can work 24/7 and recharge themselves like Roombas. They can be constantly measuring soil properties, pulling weeds, killing individual pests and constantly update a map of the individual state of ripeness of everything on the farm. This will allow some very intensive use of the land, including no-till agriculture, interspersing complementary crops to minimize soil damage, etc. Basically the robots will have the luxury of babying every square meter of land so that it is maximally productive. I can even imagine that with enough crop species growing together, farms of the future could start looking more like wilderness and might actually be nice to hike through.

Re:Crop spraying by UAVs (drones)

[caseih]

But of course you mean spraying with chemicals. What is your "ecological bio substance" if not a chemical of some sort. Perhaps you mean naturally-occurring chemical instead of a synthetically-derived chemical. There is quite a bit of research going into using naturally-occurring chemicals as pesticides but the ironic thing is very few of them make it to market because they are simply too toxic compared to synthetic pesticides. And by toxic I mean poisonous to birds and mammals. Kind of interesting.

Re:Crop spraying by UAVs (drones)

[Max_W]

It could for example be wasp's eggs http://www.bbc.com/news/techno... . Or garlic infusion, tabacco infusion, etc.

Maybe. Talk to Brian Aldiss first.

[product_bucket]

Just make sure the robots NEVER run out of work to do.

Robotic farming

[buss_error]

I'm still waiting for that flying car I was promised in the 1960s.

Farming isn't planting a seed and jumping out of the way before it sprouts and knocks your eye out. Things like market conditions, projected harvests, government regulations (try planting cotton without letting the USDA know about it!), how a field drains, where the culverts have a habit of overflowing, and heck, what field the boys around will ride their ATVs in or their families make an impromptu road though change the factors in how a field is maintained.

Sure, a tractor that drives itself is handy. In fact, it is a tremendous help in preventing "greening" (running over your own crops). However, a human will always be needed on any farm of a meaningful scale (anything more than a few thousand acres).
The unpredictable things around will simply make complete robotic farming impossible. Things like (happened last month) thieves stole the diesel out of the fuel dump. 170K gallons of diesel vanished in a 47 hour period. That's about 20 truck loads. (we all thought they were -delivering- it, not hauling it away!)

Will it help? Yes.
Will it eliminate the need for a human? Nope!

Re:Robotic farming

[Locke2005]

Remember that 60's sci-fi vision of the future where computers were giant video screens that communicated to you in spoken English? I've got an Amazon Echo, a Google Home, a chromecast, and a 4K TV... I realized the other day that we're finally there!

Re:Robotic farming

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the computers that were on space ships exploring the Galaxy, traveling by Warp and teleporting people and material from space to the ground?

After the apocalypse, we'll all be farmers.

[Black Parrot]

Except the ones off fighting the robots/singularity/aliens/zombies/vampires/GMO rabbits, or whoever it was that apocalypsized us.

Crop Yields Will Fall!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the IPCC and alarmists, who have completely under predicted rise in crop production for the last 25 years.

Yes and no

[Anonymous Coward]

More and more tasks will be automated. There was an article a few years ago about how an automated gate took care of milking cows as they came back into the barn - humans not involved. The same will apply with field work. Humans will supervise, occasionally go out to monitor, perhaps even take over the reins for occasional difficult bits; but the rote work that needs a human because it was complicated for machinery? Not any more. We have self-driving cars, why not self-driving farm equipment? planting, spraying, harvesting fields just means making regular passes to cover the entire ground. In a world of self-driving automobiles, covering the field is a trivial task.

(AS the article points out - also, these devices can go day and night - so one device can cover twice the acreage or more. Efficiency. )

I hope so!

[Locke2005]

One thought I keep having: when robotics gets really cheap, wouldn't using robots instead of chemicals to kill weeds, insects, and rodents be a lot more ecological and safe?

Re:I hope so!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ineffective, mites are a bit (very small) problem.

Re:I hope so!

[dbIII]

wouldn't using robots instead of chemicals to kill ... insects

Entertaining at least:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Ten minute anime:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XPlJ7S_wgA

Re:I hope so!

[Tough Love]

Ineffective, mites are a bit (very small) problem.

Not a problem that small robots can't solve.

Re:I hope so!

[Anonymous Coward]

Poultry works great for insect and weed control. Think of them as pre-programming meat robots you can eat.

Alas, the farmer with the specialized equipment to grow grain doesn't want to deal with livestock.
And his primary customer is the livestock farmer with huge fixed infrastructure investments.

Will The farmers put out of work at least be given

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the first Thanksgiving with Indians and Pilgrims enjoying the bounty of the fields.

Self-referential headlines

[ShanghaiBill]

someone remembered that "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'."

What if the headline is "Can any headline that ends in a question mark be answered by the word 'no'?"?

Re:Self-referential headlines

[Sique]

It can. It does not make sense in some cases, or is contrafactual in others. But "no" is an answer.

Re:Self-referential headlines

[Anonymous Coward]

What if the headline is "Can any headline that ends in a question mark be answered by the word 'no'?"?

Yes, they "can". Any headline question. Fuck that. ANY QUESTION can be answered "no". May not be the correct answer, but it's still an answer, and that's all you were looking for.

Re:Self-referential headlines

[SpaghettiPattern]

someone remembered that "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'."

Headline: What do we think about the statement above?
Possible answers: Yes? No?

It all has to do with open-ended vs. close-ended questions.

Barbarians versus farmers

[dbIII]

A nice little anecdote in one of the "Science of Discworld" books was about barbarians coming in and conquering places, having to run a society and then finding out that for some odd reason farmers got incredibly pissed off being allocated random blocks of dirt as if there was some difference between farming different places. The Normans hit that situation in England and a massive famine in the USSR in the 1920s can be blamed directly on an insane allocation of resources by people who knew nothing about agriculture but did not care.

This automation question is a clueless barbarian versus generations of farmers question. Accountant versus Engineer is a parallel situation.
We are the barbarians - we don't fucking know. It all looks easy to us from the outside. An agricultural scientist could answer this in a few specific cases but we can't.


"How would you automate tasks you can fully understand?" is a good question - this one is not. It's Popular Mechanics 1950s hype that somehow made it past an editor or maybe thrown in to "shake us up" to see if we can get a townies versus rural argument going.

Re:Barbarians versus farmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Popular Mechanics 1950s hype that somehow made it past an editor or maybe thrown in to "shake us up" to see if we can get a townies versus rural argument going.

The most insightful comment on this story.

Of course not

[blindseer]

Farming is a business and while driving a tractor is part of the job it is actually a very small part of it. I grew up on a farm and while younger I had a view of what Dad did as largely that of driving a tractor because that is mostly what I saw him do during the summer. As I got older I realized what made the difference between a successful farmer and a not so successful one. What farming is about is managing resources.

One resource is money. Decisions have to be made on what needs to be bought, what kind, how much, at what price, etc. Land needs to be managed. What crops should be planted in a field, what variety, how much fertilizer, what kind of herbicide, etc. Tractors, buildings, and other assets need to be repaired or replaced.

There is a long process to planting a field that starts when the harvest is over. Contracts for fertilizer and seed need to be negotiated and signed. Equipment from the harvest need to be stored in the sheds for the winter, and in a way to make them easily accessible for the planting. If there is a business case for a new piece of equipment this needs to be done in the fall and winter, because once the spring planting starts its real hard to find time to stop and shop for a new tractor.

A similar process takes place for the harvest. Weeks before the crops are due to be harvested the combine needs to be checked out, fired up, lubed, and if anything is found broken then parts need to be ordered. The corn dryer will also need to be checked out, it will be fired up, any frayed wiring replaced, motors lubricated, augers put in place, fuel ordered, and contracts for selling the harvest negotiated and signed.

People might automate the tractor driving but that's what farmers do for fun.

Re:Of course not

[Ryanrule]

Please, software does all that management work now.

Re:Of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of what you describe is the easy stuff to automate.

Determining needs, projecting resource utilization, contracting to buy and sell...these are all things that can be automated very easily because they don't involve much or any interaction with the physical world. Maybe having some telemetry so the computer knows usage rates, available resources, consumption patterns, and so on. Not fancy telemetry...the sort of telemetry a modern car has today. I get an email if my car's windshield washer fluid is low, and can remotely find out how many miles it has been driven, how much fuel, even current GPS coordinates and whether the doors are locked. Feed all of that into the right software/AI and it could easily spit out a "todo list" every morning with all the chores you need to accomplish.

Take those todo lists and develop machines to do everything starting with the most frequent and labor-intensive jobs, and eventually you will have a farm that only needs a human to deal with exceptions. Keep that up long enough and it will be able to deal with all of the common exceptions too. It may never be able to handle the really rare exceptions (meteor strikes) but that's more about economics than technology. They happen so infrequently, and can have impacts on the basic feasibility of the farm (why continue to farm if half the continent is buried under volcanic ash?), so it doesn't make sense to automate dealing with those sorts of issues.

Re:Of course not

[nightfire-unique]

I just got a ride on a John Deer 9650, harvesting 7 acres of soy bean. My first time on a farm. At least that part sure is fun. :)

Re:Of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

>What crops should be planted in a field, what variety
    Honest question, (pardon my ignorance), but aren't farmers 'almost' told what to plant? I mean soybean, corn, wheat- all the cash crops. Are those not assigned by big-agro? Or at least coerced into annually repeating the same crops over & over, to satisfy some contract or gov't subsidy deal?

Thanks for clarification.
- a city slicker, (with a small veggie garden).

Re:Of course not

[blindseer]

but aren't farmers 'almost' told what to plant?

I grew up on a family farm and knew a lot of people that also grew up on family farms. A common practice is to use the best ground for corn year after year. Corn is good business as it can be sold locally to dairy, beef, pork, and (more recently) ethanol producers. The rest of the land is rotated between corn, soybeans, hay/alfalfa, and perhaps other crops. I haven't seen wheat grown here but I assume it is possible, and I've seen sunflowers grown once in great while.

A farmer will decide on what to grow based on contract prices (they'll sell the crop even before it is planted), expected future prices, what did well in the past on the land, what crops they need for their own animals (if any), expected weather for the coming year, and other factors. In many ways this is a gamble. The farmer is looking ahead on what will bring the best income and place a bet with what crops they plant.

There are large corporate farms and "co-ops" where the farmer will take orders from someone else on what to plant. In this case that person is less a "farmer" and more a "farmhand". A farmhand will be told what to plant. A farmer will have to take into consideration what will sell well and what the land can produce, but no one "tells" them what to plant.

There are government subsidies but as far as I can tell they are not nearly as common as before, but I may be mistaken. Government subsidies will tend to make a farmer want to plant those crops, which can lead to farmers planting corn on the same land year after year. This continually growing the same crop might require great care and expense to keep from depleting the soil of nutrients. On our farm we'd always grow corn in this one field, while the crops were rotated elsewhere, I suspect that this was largely due to being downhill from the hog shed. Manure overflow from the shed would run into the field.

Some farmers know that growing corn every year in the same field is not optimal for the land, a rotated crop could mean a better yield for several years after. They still choose to grow corn year after year because the loss of corn income that one year is unlikely to be made up by whatever might be grown in the rotation year. I know a lot of people might fall faint from hearing a farmer would choose to not rotate crops but when one is in the business of growing corn then one must grow corn or be out of business. That does not mean a farmer cannot still rotate crops if a business case can be made but when corn prices are high a poor yield of corn can still mean more money than a good crop of beans.

While on the farm I thought government subsidies were great for farming, which may be largely because everyone I knew thought they were great. After leaving the farm I now realize just how bad they are for the consumers AND the farmers. It's these subsidies that coerce farmers to grow corn year after year when if those subsidies didn't exist the long term gain of future yield would offset the loss of growing a rotation crop once in a while.

Triffids

[Tough Love]

The vegetables will be fully responsible for growing themselves. When fully grown they will walk to the truck and slice themselves up, ready to serve.

I thought farming was already fully automated

[h33t l4x0r]

Wait, we're talking about Diablo III, right?

Re: I thought farming was already fully automated

[joao.cordeiro]

In a way, yes.. As a traditional game farmer, i nolonger play Diablo3 i cant compete against bots farming all day. I need to sleep, eat, and sometimes make errors bots dont.. Real farmers have the same problem

Why should it be?

[tietokone-olmi]

What would the farmers do, instead?

If the proposed model doesn't include something besides "well they can go on the dole, or into the forced-labour workfare force", it's likely shit. Megacorporations (i.e. mono- and duopolies) having all the farmbots isn't actually desirable from an economics perspective.

Re: Why should it be?

[joao.cordeiro]

Today, every one has the responsability over its own future. It as been known for a long time that farming was a dead job, just as mailman or a knife sharper. So, why do parents still teach their children to be farmers? Now those ppl will have to learn a new craft to have a job.

Not the way they think.

[Anonymous Coward]

My 60+ yo Dad is a small independent farmer. He thinks robotic tractors are the future. Lots and lots of drones. Harvesting everything at the exact perfect time requires more accuracy.

What about quality?

[Erziram]

While automation can provide the volume which is needed to sustain a bigger population, this might not necessarily prove to be the way for quality. Quality through automation of farming has been plummeting through time, the various levels of vitamins, calcium, oxidants and other building stones of a healthy life are more and more absent in todays vegetables for instance. We'll all be popping suplemental pills within 5-10 years at this rate by my guess..

Automation is slavery redux

[Jesus H Rolle]

The question ought to be rephrased "Should we allow it?", or better yet "How should we deal with the inevitable?" Advanced automation is reintroducing slavery, and the slaves grow more capable each day. In the antebellum US, there was a dirt-poor inbred white farmer underclass that couldn't compete with slaves. Eventually the slaveowners used them as infantry.

Re: Automation is slavery redux

[joao.cordeiro]

The problem with slavery was never the amount of work done, it was the abuse of other humans. But you can compare slaves with robots and find out thereal problem. In slavery, the owners were happy and not poor. Even the lower classes had a slave. But now, general ppl do not have access to this new slaves. Some few ppl have acomulated almost all the cash and then use those expensive slave to crush down all the others. The problem is Capitalism.

Re: Automation is slavery redux

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitalism is only a problem if you aren't aware of how much worse the alternatives are.

I spent thanksgiving dinner with a large group of Vietnamese Montagnard people (mostly Jarai tribe) who had come to the States in the mid to late 1980's. They did the cooking, by the way, and it was delicious. They were all, to a person, about five feet tall or less. They spent years fighting the North after the Americans bugged out, and years more migrating through Cambodia and Laos trying to get to Thailand. This was during the time that Cambodian cities were emptied by the Khmer Rouge, and everyone was forced to try to live off the land. The Montagnards had to survive by eating anything that moved, snakes, insects, whatever. The suffering, hunger and malnourishment must been terrible.

Their children were born and grew up in America. They only know the stories their parents tell them about such hardship, and they are often much taller and more robust than their parents. They live in nice houses in nice suburban neighborhoods, and drive big cars and have big flatscreen HDTVs like most Americans.

If you think Capitalism is the problem with the world, you haven't seen much of the world. Poverty, poor health, short life and starvation were the default state of human existence before capitalism, industrialization, and free trade were invented. If you want to live in a place where there is no capitalism, I suggest you try Venezuela. It sounds like your utopia.

Re: Automation is slavery redux

[tehcyder]

Yes, the only alternative to 100% unfettered libertarian-capitalism is the fucking Khmer Rouge.

It's not like the US or Europe or Japan has any governments or anything.

Re: Automation is slavery redux

[joao.cordeiro]

The alternative to capitalism is not comunism... The alternative to capitalism is everyting else that has been aplied and also everyting else that has not been aplied. The alternative to capitalism is anything that sets a limit to how much value you can own VS the rest of the world. Today there is no such limit.

Not quite.

[YukariHirai]

It will become very automated, but there will still need to be some degree of human involvement, just like every other industry that has had the absolute shit automated out of it... which is to say just about all of them.

The question of whether or not [industry] will be mostly automated isn't the one we should be asking, because the answer is that it inevitably will be. The question we should be asking is "what is to become of all the people no longer needed to do these jobs?", or better yet "should getting basic necessities to live such as food and housing continue be tied to performing work when increasing automation means that jobs for humans grow fewer while human population grows larger?"

The answer may lie in a universal basic income, or it might lie in adjusting the workforce so each individual works way fewer hours, or possibly some combination of both. And/or something else again. What is for certain is that the "everyone must work 40 hours a week to get by" model is unsustainable.

More yes than no

[rkordmaa]

The part that is driving around the tractors on the fields, yeah obviously, there are clear benefits to having a tractor do its own thing without constant supervision. Autonomous vehicles need to be allowed on public roads first, because machines do need to move between fields etc, but yeah, totally viable. The no part is when things break down, decisions need to be made etc etc. Same as any automation really, you make the machine manage on its own, but you still need maintenance, you still need to manage the business side etc etc. And its not going to happen on mom and pops cabbage plot, automation is difficult, but on large scale, yeah it can pay off very nicely. I would say farming is the most automated field already, yeah the combine harvester needs a driver, but you don't need 1000 peasants with sickles anymore. Now its just a matter of optimizing away that driver. Farming automation business case is remarkably similar to open pit mining automation the huge difference from automation point of view are the public roads that machines need to traverse from field to field. But it looks like that problem is mostly solved by now and its just a matter of legislation.

Mindfulness

[Anonymous Coward]

But will robots be more mindful of nature and ecosystem than humans?

Huey, Dewey and Louie where are you?

[wisebabo]

:)

Yes

[joao.cordeiro]

All competitive farming will be automated. Ppl will still be able to farm as a hobbie, but they will never beat automation prices.

Supply and demand?

[jandersen]

The assumption is always that the human population will continue to grow as it has in the past, and that we will always have enough resources to do so; both of which are unlikely, in my view. The following will seem very gloomy, I know, but I am actually optimistic about humanity - I think we can solve our problems, I just think people are being hopelessly naive about the prospect of continuing the current lifestyle, as well as terribly unimaginative and to be honest, lacking in self-confidence, when it comes to adjusting to changes. Even the flabbiest couch potato, who feels that he can't live without his constant overconsumption, is fully able to adapt - and is guaranteed to end up enjoying the experience, if they will allow themselves.

Firstly, we are already running up against resource restrictions - water (useable water, that is) in many regions and energy are the obvious ones. But we are also running out of less obvious things like disease resistance and what I vaguely call "ecology": the network of habitats, organisms etc, that work together as a whole and provide a number of essential services (such as insects pollinating food crops - not just honey bees, but a lot of species that depend on the nature we are so good at messing up). All these problems are solvable, but so far the understanding and the will to act have been rather lacking.

If we don't solve the resource problems as well as get our population growth seriously under control, we will reach the point where we have an unsustainaby large population and no resources, at which point it will crash catastrophically; after which point all farming will presumably be manual, at best.

But assuming that we do manage to get ourselves under control and solve the problems we have created, I don't think farming will ever be fully automated in the future. I think a very important part of making humanity's presence on Earth sustainable, long-term, is to get away from the idea of constant growth, so most production must in the future be strictly limited to what is actually needed for immediate or nearly-immediate consumption; hence, the need for food production by farming will be much less. Add to this the fact that there is a lot of people who actually enjoy working manually with the soil, and I think the need for fully automatic farming will be rather small; it will probably be seen as an option to be used if we have to - like for growing very specialised crops (such as algae that produce specific chemicals).

Who is Mr. Will Farming

[dremon]

And why should it be fully automated in the future?

No, the World Bank does not say that

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we please stop recycling this thoroughly debunked canard. Please.

http://blog.ucsusa.org/doug-boucher/humanitys-need-for-food-in-2050-848

It's a gradual process; going on a long time

[knorthern knight]

You're not going to see an overnight conversion. A job gets automated here; a job gets automated there; etc, etc. It all adds up. And it's been going on a long while. One one occasion Krushchev visited an American farm in the 1960's during a trip to the USA. He remarked that the American farm was run by 11 people. Meanwhile, a Russian commune with the same acreage needed 11,000 people. That was over 50 years ago.

Farming has already been mechanized/automated to a large extent, and the "low-hanging fruit", i.e. the easiest savings, have already been made. Now it's mostly a matter of scale. A corporate farm with 2000 acres buys out an adjoining 20-acre farm. Technically, we've gone from 2 farms to 1 farm. The combines/milking-machines/whatever from the large farm now run 1% longer, even though "we've lost 50% of the farms and farmers in the area".

FarmerBot-209

[easyTree]

"Get orrrrf moiiiii laaaand. You have fifteen seconds to comply."

You are what you eat.

[seoras]

I grew up on a farm, after 20 years of city life I've returned to farm living. I'm a meat eater, I milk my own cow, got egg laying hens, grow most of my own food etc.
That's just to frame what I'm about to say which might sound like I'm a vegan.

If you've actually looked at the state of the creatures you are either eating, or consuming by products from, you'll see some real misery.
It's horrible. As a kid we had battery hens and mass produced eggs in addition to cattle for beef/milk. Not something I'm proud of.

There's no scientific basis for what I'm about to suggest, flame away, but I'd rather eat of/from something that had a happy life than something that lived a short miserable existence.
Why? "You are what you eat".
I'd like to see research to see if there's a correlation between quality of life of our "food", and the mood and well being of the consumer.
It's just a suggestion, I make no claims that it eating "happy food", makes you happy.

Now given the state of mainstream farming today, and how industrialised it's become already, the thought of it becoming even more cold, automated and processed without any human compassion or thought involved is enough to make me consider to the tofu.

Re:You are what you eat.

[Anonymous Coward]

I value certain qualities of meat that are lacking in most industry produced meat. I shouldn't be too fatty and the fat should be well distributed. It is almost like strawberries: The big industrial produced ones lack flavor. Bigger sized and faster grown isn't always better. Avoiding antibiotics unless it is necessary also has its benefits.

Re:You are what you eat.

[Anonymous Coward]

I also work in Agriculture. I've been in many of the 'industrialized' facilities you mention. We often apply human standards to our expectations for the life of something we are going to eat. The best example is poultry. People see them packed into cages or hundreds of thousands of them in a barn and assume they hate that... when they don't. Walk into a free range house and you will see them huddled together in exactly the same way because poultry is a vulnerable species and they feel secure this way. Its not in a farmers interest to have stressed or 'sad' animals as they get sick more often and require more care. While there certainly are extreme cases, in my experience on hundreds of farms I have never seen anything that has bothered me.

Re:You are what you eat.

[Anonymous Coward]

>I'd like to see research to see if there's a correlation between quality of life of our "food", and the mood and well being of the consumer.
    The very visible effect of factory farming can be seen in our penchant for Energy Drinks and its opposite prescription drug abuse & efforts to get weed legalized.
The mere fact that we as a society must now need, market, consume, and advertise constant mood enhancers is no accident. It's because the S.A.D. (standard American diet) is lacking. And we struggle to make up for it via add-ons.

    (Now I'm not knocking the occasional coffee or beer, I'm talking about the ritual habitual use & societial acceptance of uppers & downers, to replace good food & exercise).

Old idea

[clickclickdrone]

I had a book as kid that was published in the very late 60's or early 70's that was all about The Future. It covered a pretty broad base and by and large is panning out nicely - big flat screen TVs, working from home, automating medical analysis etc. On farming, it had robot vehicles being computer controlled with the 'farmer' sitting in front of a bank of screens monitoring it all.

It depends on the terrain

[jgfenix]

If your farm is a big plain it can be done. Now if the terrain is more abrupt or you have many small plots of land it is more tricky.

another climate hoax article yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Automation takes the craftsmanship out of things, and there is a difference in quality or else we wouldn't be seeing such a resurgence in hand-crafted goods/services. I'm sure the people living in some sandy shit hole would appreciate automated anything if it meant the difference between starvation and survival.... until you try to hand them something that comes from their region that THEY'VE been making for centuries years by hand.

Long story short this is just another bullshit leftist climate change article trying to cleverly hide behind something geeky such as robots and automation.

Re:another climate hoax article yawn

[Kiuas]

Automation takes the craftsmanship out of things

What? We're talking about farming here. Farmwork is already heavily mechanized. Even organic farmers use modern equipment, computers, tractors and so on to help thme do the work and quite many of the fruits and vegetables people eat already are picked up by machines. The only change is that farmer himself will no longer have to be sitting on top of the tractor but instead can monitor the progress of the harvest from his computer. How is that 'taking the craftmanship out of things'??? I don't care one iota if the potato I buy has been picked by a a tractor driven by a guy or one driving itself, as long as it tastes alright.

I'm sure the people living in some sandy shit hole would appreciate automated anything if it meant the difference between starvation and survival

I'm sure people living anywhere in the world appreciate automated anything if it means the difference between paying more and paying less for that same thing. That's why industrial scale automated production is so popular: start making 'hand-crafted' electronics for example and they're going to be so expensive that nearly no-one could buy them.

Long story short this is just another bullshit leftist climate change article

Long story short you just went full retard. Never go full retard.

Re:another climate hoax article yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

"Full retard" was reading the way you had to explain to yourself how everything was going to be just fine. It's a fact hand crafted goods are not only popular but gaining while mass produced automated bullshit burns (literally in the samsung note 7's case) the consumer. Sorry I'm not sorry you can't read between the lines and lap every left-ist BS article up from your bowl like a good boy. This was just another BS climate change article trying to use robots and automation to sound geeky whether you have the knowledge or comprehend it or not. (my guess is on the later considering your pitiful reply)

Re:another climate hoax article yawn

[Kiuas]

It's a fact hand crafted goods are not only popular but gaining while mass produced automated bullshit burns

It's a fact that people don't give a sit whether or not their farming is automated because it already is (to a large extent) and this won't change it (from the consumer's perspective) one bit except make production more efficient and has drive the cost of food down, which is a good thing, so this whole 'automation makes everything bad' -whine is pretty ridiculous.

We wouldn't have anywhere near the amount of goods to go around without mass production, because handcrafting complex items is time consuming, expensive, and often very, very inefficient. The food production on a global level relies already on automation and machinery to be able to feed the billions of us. If we went your way and started going backwards towards more manual labor, we'd lower the food output and increase starvation. Like honestly, how fucking stupid are you? Do you not understand how industrial farming works and how little this differs from it except being more efficient?

This was just another BS climate change article

The article didn't even mention climate change, but was merely talking about the improvements in efficiency we can get by automating farming. Obviously in the long term this probably has a beneficial effect for the climate as well, but that was in no way the point made in the article, which you'd know if you were able to do basic reading comprehension.

It takes a gigantic moron to look at technological improvements which help us produce more food for people and call it bullshit.

The Cost Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

These days only large farming concerns can afford the equipment required to run farms at a profit. There are some unusual exceptions but by and large you need to be big to get by in farming. Mom and pop farms simply can rarely afford equipment as things are now. More automated equipment means more expenses and not the least of those expenses involves interest on loans to purchase equipment. The effect is to increase the lenders' shares of the income of the farm. It all works out until it doesn't work out and then the consequences are a total disaster. When you are making payments on that $200,000 tractor and you hit a two year drought the payments on that tractor do not stop. The same issues occur in factories. A small factory with a twenty five million dollar sales per year often is forced into not buying the really good equipment to do the best possible job and create the best quality product. And if they do try to modernize an ever larger fee goes to the money lenders. A ripple in sales for the year will wipe out such factories. The promise of automation, so far, can only be taken advantage of by the really large companies. For example major brands of wrist watches tend to be built by robotic equipment. The public gets sturdy, accurate and long living watches. But someone wanting to start a watch factory had better have one heck of a bank account to compete. And that again gets the money lenders adding costs to the end products. The promise of automation has not done well except at the top of various markets.

Yes.

[drinkypoo]

A lot of work is going into fruit-picking robots. This is the only part of the job which cannot currently be done by a machine. Not damaging the fruit is currently too hard for a robot, but they're almost there. The robot can also use laser spectroscopy to determine when food is ripe, which makes it potentially superior to a human; humans can also do that with an external device, but it will take them longer.

When picking can be done cost-effectively by robots, the amount of human labor in agriculture will drop off to virtually nothing. You can see that this is already true in the agricultural industries which are highly mechanizable, like wheat.

Average work week reduced from 60 hours to 33

[raymorris]

As I write this, I'm on a week of paid vacation. Next month, I'll take another week off.

In 1900, the US average hours worked per week was about 60. 12 hour work days were common. (See "Hours of Work in U.S. History". Economic History Association.)
Today, the average hours worked is 33. ("United States Average Weekly Hours". Bsu.edu .)

So we now work about HALF as much as our grandparents. Our homes are over twice as large, on average. Twice as much stuff, half as much working.

Re: Average work week reduced from 60 hours to 33

[bestweasel]

The average work week gives no information about regional or any other variations let alone individual circumstances. There are many who can't work as many hours as they need or have to work too many hours to make a living.

Re:Average work week reduced from 60 hours to 33

[Dare nMc]

> So we now work about HALF as much as our grandparents

During the same time Women went from 20% employed rate to 60% employed. So we have 50% more of the population working than we had in the 1900's, so really we have only reduced the average working hours by 4 hours per week. We went from (60 hours * 40% working) = 24hours to (33 * 60%) = 20 hours worked per week/person today. Granted because of washing machines, running water, efficient grocery stores... The quality of life at home more than doubled, instead of working long hours at home that were not counted as employed.

Re:Average work week reduced from 60 hours to 33

[Marxist Hacker 42]

What business are you in that still offers paid vacations? I haven't had a paid vacation since 1998.

Re:Average work week reduced from 60 hours to 33

[LynnwoodRooster]

I thought pretty much any salaried position came with paid vacation/PTO? I voluntarily gave that up - because I went the consultant route. I don't get paid for my vacation time, but I more than make up for it with my billing rate during the time I choose to work.

Re:Average work week reduced from 60 hours to 33

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Haven't had a salaried position in a while.

AI + small robots

[Anonymous Coward]

Good AI and robotics enables physical removal of weeds instead of using herbicides. It also enables exact fertilizing by automated soil analysis and correction (e.g. sampling of every 100m^2, mapping of deficiencies, targeted fertilizing by air or ground).

Instead of "brute-forcing" fertilization and weed control like we do now (by lack of fine control over the environment and limited knowledge), with enough data and robotics, most pollution and costs can be minimized, and food productivity improved.

This could be done with small automated ground robots moving through the crops, maybe a drone from time to time to detect growth problems in certain areas.

Robotic weed removal could solve the super-weeds problem: just teach the AI that whatever is not [cultivated plant] in this area should be removed. (Just don't forget to include the Three Laws first, just in case.)

Not as long as...

[Chris Mattern]

...Zynga needs eyeballs.

Syntheflesh

[fyngyrz]

No, but there are plenty of other reasons. Hence the huge market for sex toys. When the sex toys are better, the market will only get better.

Same goes for men, of course. Perhaps more so.

I expect the entire dynamic to change.

Re: Syntheflesh

[Anonymous Coward]

What is that? Your blog? I don't think I'd take credit for it if I were you.

1$ workers

[Bender Unit 22]

As long as you can get 1$ workers from Mexico there's no need for innovation.

Half

[campuscodi]

It's already half-automated in many parts of the world. I'll give it until 2030-2040.

Already mostly here in Massachusetts

[tbuskey]

http://passionatefoodie.blogsp...

Little Leaf Farms' bagged lettuce lasts longer (a least a week longer!) than the other brands in the stores. Probably because it doesn't spend a week being shipped from CA or FL to MA.

Will make very little difference

[Freedom Bug]

Dryland farming on flat land in Saskatchewan, Canada already is down to about 1 human per 5000 acres (20 square kilometres) due to the use of very large equipment that can till, seed and harvest hundreds of acres per day. Since you're always going to have to have a human in the loop somewhere just to give commands and monitor the robots that ratio probably isn't going to change much whether the equipment is automated or just very large.

of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Farming will be automated, but there will be no people to eat the food

Small scale also needed

[tbuskey]

Many Farmers do need scale. Some don't.

There are farmers making a living supplying farmers markets and local restaurants with vegetables. They don't need 100 acres. They might only need 5 acres and 2-4 people to work it. For that size farm, a 4 wheel tractor is stupid expensive and it can't maneuver.

As a consumer, I go to the farmer's market. I belong to a CSA. And I have a garden.

My garden is ~ 20' x 50' and I don't have much time for it. I have automated watering and mulch the heck out of it to keep weeds from getting going. I barely have time to harvest, let alone weed, fertilize and pick out pests. Much of the reason I garden is to minimize pesticides so I avoid that too,

If I was more knowledgeable and had more time, I could eliminate the CSA . The CSAs in our area probably run $500/summer up to $700. That could pay for a lot of robot!

Robots can do anything

[snookiex]

On a long enough time line, anything can be done by robots. The thing is, I don't think we have that much of time. As others have pointed out farming involves many complicated scenarios. For example, harvesting coffee beans is a time-consuming and exhausting task that requires special care and depending on the country, the terrain and social conditions won't help at all. It's like, autonomous trucks may work nicely on an Autobahn, but I want to see that working in Thailand or Venezuela.

100% Correct

[Pollux]

And to add to the money side, there's banking, human resources (many farms use hired hands), filing and redeeming crop insurance...

The parent post best describes what farms currently are. My mom and dad can both talk about what it used to be like growing up on a farm; waking up at 5am, feeding livestock, cleaning pens, milking cows, their dads fixing the tractor and equipment, tilling, plowing, seeding, fertilizing, spraying, harvesting...and lots and lots of praying for good weather and a good harvest. But most of all, it was always a roller-coaster ride of two or three really good years, maybe including a boom year, followed by some break-even years, maybe including a few bust years, with never a guarantee that any year could make them money.

Those "family farm" days are disappearing. Farm sizes are growing, and the number of farmers are shrinking. But that's not to say that families still don't own their farms. Crops aren't rotated nearly as frequently. Livestock aren't kept on the side and graze the fields. Machines and automation have evolved, and farms now focus on one or two crops (or livestock) with greater efficiency. Farms have changed from labor-intensive diversified endeavors to an efficient, business-intensive farm.

My grandpa managed a 120-acre farm. Farmers around where I live talk about how they manage their 1,000+ acre farms. Automated machinery will just make these farms grow even larger and make it easier for farmers to own and farm more land.

It will hurt poor [illegal] immigrants.

[0xG]

And I say this without judgment.
Trump will not need to build his wall; there will be no more work for the poor.

Will the GOP go for that?

[OneHundredAndTen]

They are bound to lose a big chunk of their voters.

Re:Will the GOP go for that?

[soc_cost_priv_gains]

I'm sure they can find someone or something to blame, after all they were able to blame the loss of coal mining jobs to environmental regulations even though cheap natural gas was the real culprit.

Not gonna happen

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in Agriculture, and while there is a lot of theoretical technology out there very little of it is finding its way onto an actual farm. Margins in farming are far too low to justify the costs of this stuff and the labor savings from automation is hardly enough to offset the costs. People like driving tractors, its not seen as a hassle.

Now automation could replace all the Mexicans that pick fruit and stuff, but I can't see it happening with row-crop.

Is this really a question for

[Anonymous Coward]

./?

I mean, we are a community of nerds, and some of us are actively automating farms already (I am).

They already are

[rbrander]

"Automated" is a continuum, not a binary. You can't find any process that's fully automated to the standard of "runs without any intervention for longer than a human lives"...and arguably, if it needs maintenance every 125 years, then it's still not "fully" automated. Maybe the still-unbuilt 10,000 year clock would qualify.

But by more reasonable standards, we're already done. Single families (largish, busy ones) can now farm a 70,000-acre farm themselves, provided the farm machinery stays in service. There was no such thing as a 70,000-acre farm back when there were people on the moon.

Here's a really great example because it involves the plant that put 20 generations through lives of slavery: cotton. In "Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy" Pietra Rivoli backtracked all the globalized industry that gets a T-shirt to her drug store. After working backwards through China and Malaysia and India, it turns out the original cotton still comes from Texas, though labour prices are far higher than Africa or Asia, because it's been so well automated.

She interviews a 80-something farmer who used to pick it by hand, along with the hired Hispanic help, remembers how hot and hard and backbreaking it was, why only slaves or the desperately poor would do the work. And then she traces how many advances have taken place in the intervening years, one task after another automated, and finally centralized onto one giant piece of machinery that practically has a "HARVEST COTTON" button on the dash, and a place to put your book. She notes the 80-something now has time for a nap after lunch.

That may not be 100% automated, but replacing a barracks full of actual slaves with one part-time old guy in an air-conditioned cab is clearly 99% of the job, done.

Bigger problem is the false premise

[Solandri]

Summary/TFA says:

The World Bank says we'll need to produce 50% more food by 2050 if the global population continues to rise at its current pace.

The problem with that premise is, population growth in developed nations is nearly non-existent. Several developed nations are even shrinking in population (e.g. Japan, Portugul, Spain).

Nearly all of the world's population growth is in developing nations, where subsistence farmers are being put out of business by food imports from developed nations (either bought or donated). If you want to feed the world's growing population, automated farming in developed nations is not the way to do it. Automated farming in developed nations will happen simply because it's a more cost-efficient way to produce domestically consumed crops (or crops traded with other developed trading partners).

But to solve the "world's" population growth problem, the #1 priority has to be to help develop the economies of these undeveloped nations. This means stopping food imports which distort food prices and make it impossible for local farmers to survive by selling what they grow in their local market. Providing food, water, medical care, and building shelters for free as foreign aid is fine as a short-term solution to temporary crises like an earthquake or cyclone or a one-year crop failure. But long-term that "humanitarian" aid just makes things worse. It promotes population growth (doesn't cost the parents more to have more kids) beyond the ability of the region's agriculture to sustain itself. The long-term solution has to be economic development so the local people can grow their own food, develop their own clean water supplies, educate their own doctors and build their own hospitals, and build their own homes. A system of commerce and trade so these people can make a living doing this stuff by themselves has to be in place if they are to survive on their own. Otherwise you're consigning them to a fate of being forced to suck off the teat of developed nations forever just to survive.

Re:Bigger problem is the false premise

[CanadianMacFan]

We don't need to produce 50% more food by 2050 when we're throwing out so much food today. In the developing countries it's mainly because of a lack of storage and refrigeration causing the wastage. There is also the problem of getting the food to market before it spoils. If the proper investments can be made to help those problems then the farmers will be better off, people will be able to get more food, and all done without more land and chemicals.

Yes we are going to have to produce more food in the future but it won't have to be the 50% that the World Bank is stating.

Kill all humans

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we should stop the population from growing? I mean, global warming and all that.

Africa is going to quadruple its population by 2100 according to the UN and we really don't want that! By that time half the worlds population will be n1gg3s..

Are you working short-term contracts?

[raymorris]

It appears you're a software person. What kind of software person does NOT get paid time off? The only thing I can't think of is if you're working short contracts and forgetting to include time off between contracts in your pricing.

On the other hand, your sig suggests that you might LIKE Agile, so maybe you're a really BAD programmer. ;)

Re:Are you working short-term contracts?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

There are long term contracts?

Yes and no. Wheat vs Raspberries

[Anonymous Coward]

Wheat and Raspberries have very different farming processes. A combine is already pretty much fully automated. Harvesting a Raspberry takes quite a bit of manual dexterity and attention to access detail. Then there is the whole question of hydroponics and Artificial Lighting. When these processes are economic, spending more on the automated farming processes makes much more sense.

I think this is fantasy

[siamesevodka]

This is a popular science flying cars article. We all should have one by now. It's true that farming has changed, but total automation is a ways off. Robotic tractors and Combines won't replace the farmer. Does a robotic tractor know how to till terraced land, deal with hidden mud holes that pop up after storms deal with rocky soil etc. Combines right now are in the 300,000 dollar range, and one of them going straight through a fence and driving through a creek because the gps failed, is not going to sit well with farmers. Air seed drills right now are in the 100,000 dollar range and are getting to the level of sophistication that they require a lot of maintenance. They are used in no till farming, and save fuel and water. But maintaining everything to get the seed in the ground is starting to take up any cost savings there is. To drive the robotic tractor and combine you have to have a gps ground station that amplifies the signal to get the accuracy you need. Last time I checked most farmers who used them had to pool together to buy them and share the use which isn't always ideal. Automation has it's place, but it is not quite ready for prime time in farming. There have been how many accidents with driverless cars? I'm still waiting for my Jetson flying car from Spacely Sprockets.

Full automation isn't necessary

[MpVpRb]

If a robot could be designed that recognized and pulled weeds, herbicide would become unnecessary, along with herbicide-resistant GMOs

Minecraft

[watermark]

My minecraft farm is already automated. I'm happy to lend them some red stone to help in their first automation project.

Make A Robot Farm Laberer?

[LifesABeach]

Why not? What have you got to lose?

When will we learn?

[GinaDEEE]

As somebody who actually has a lot of clients in the Agricultural sector, I find all these opinions rather amusing. Robots and automation haven't substantially improved automobile quality. Although the auto industry hasn't volunteered the information, I imagine that recalls are more frequent now. Why? Because there are so many ways in which the human mind and senses are superior to machines. Personally, I would not want to eat food picked by machines that cannot distinguish between ripe, green, spoiled, molded and contaminated food...nor do they possess the fine motor skills for harvesting WITHOUT destroying the plant itself which is pretty bad for berries, fruit and nut trees, etc. I would also not want to eat a burger prepared by a robot that cannot determine if the meat being cooked is spoiled or not, because the robot lacks a sense of smell. As for the Cesar Chavez portrayal of farm workers as being poor and exploited, I am out in the fields with these workers and they have nicer cars than I do, work fewer months out of the year and can make between $20 and $25 an hour harvesting, pruning and cultivating crops. This is not uniformly the case, but it is what I have seen in all my clients. The ONLY people that benefit from robotics are the multinationals who sell them and the robotic designers. Society at large is NOT improved by this activity and it will just shrink the tax revenues once again and put the money in the pockets of the uber-elite.

Automation == Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

The fundamental flaw with presuming full automation (in anything) is the fundamental reality of finite energy reserves. People who are still delusional about this and especially "technology utopians".

The largest oil reserve which was discovered in 1951 is Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. It's the source of 10% of all oil consumed on the planet. There have been NO substitutes discovered that come even remotely close to its size. Depending on whether you choose to go by proven reserves or proven plus estimated reserves, it currently has either 4 years of oil total left or 47 years of oil total left. The reality is somewhere in between and likely extractability will cease before even then. We're not talking about 100s of years of status quo. We are only talking about a generation or so tops.

In general, the people who think automation can continue apace are uniformly STEM ignorant. They don't understand physics. They don't understand thermodynamics. They don't understand geology. They don't understand economics. They don't understand how things are made. They don't understand supply chains. They almost literally think that energy is always there because they can turn the key of their cars or flip a light switch so it must be infinite and eternal.

The fact of the matter we are very close to losing all of this primarily because of idiots who suffer from magical thinking when it comes to energy. The longer we delay in considering the implications the more abrupt and horrific the day of reckon will be for a larger proportional of the human population. There is nothing sacred about humans surviving another 100 years! We are expendable.

Re: Automation == Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Necessity is the mother of invention. You underestimate the human race.

Will farming be automated in the future

[Anonymous Coward]

As will all jobs I hope, banking, law, transport, manufacturing, supermarkets, etc. Then we will need massive job sharing or unemployment. The corporations will be screaming at the government to increase benefits so people can afford more goods. The governments will be screaming at the corporations to pay more tax. Am I crazy? Probably. Is the system crazy? Definitely.

Variations

[ebvwfbw]

As long as we don't get stuff that is entirely uniform. We should always have fruits and veggies that are not all alike. McDonalds I understand made farmers produce potatoes in a certain manner so they're all uniform so they all have the same chemical mixture so they all cook the same way. If you manage to get a fry cooked to proper specs, it's amazing. Crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside. Seems like I seldom get one cooked properly. Dumbass workers too lazy to do their job. They pull them out when they get to them. Sometimes this can lead to an awesome set of fries. Undercooked, they remind me of wax cylinders.