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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?
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.
With the upcoming AI/robotic revolution, the relevant question would be - what won't be fully automated?
Just remember one thing: plants crave for electrolytes.
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.
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And there is the opensource https://farmbot.io/
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.
One pound for a five minute argument, please.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
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!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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'?"?
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.
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.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wingus, Dingus! Listen up!
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.
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.
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
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.
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.