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New Autonomous Farm Wants To Produce Food Without Human Workers (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Iron Ox isn't like most robotics companies. Instead of trying to flog you its technology, it wants to sell you food. As the firm's cofounder Brandon Alexander puts it: "We are a farm and will always be a farm." But it's no ordinary farm. For starters, the company's 15 human employees share their work space with robots who quietly go about the business of tending rows and rows of leafy greens. Today Iron Ox is opening its first production facility in San Carlos, near San Francisco. The 8,000-square-foot indoor hydroponic facility -- which is attached to the startup's offices -- will be producing leafy greens at a rate of roughly 26,000 heads a year. That's the production level of a typical outdoor farm that might be five times bigger. The opening is the next big step toward fulfilling the company's grand vision: a fully autonomous farm where software and robotics fill the place of human agricultural workers, which are currently in short supply. Iron Ox uses software, dubbed "The Brain," to watch over the farm and monitor nitrogen levels, temperature, and robot location. Alexander hopes to automative every process of the farm, but human workers are currently needed to help with seeding and processing the crops. He cites the shortage of agricultural workers and the distances that fresh product currently has to be shipped for reasons why we need automated farming.
"The problem with the indoor [farm] is the initial investment in the system," says Yiannis Ampatzidis, an assistant professor of agricultural engineering at the University of Florida. "You have to invest a lot up front. A lot of small growers can't do that." Currently, Iron Ox is sending the food it produces to a local food bank and to the company salad bar.
"The problem with the indoor [farm] is the initial investment in the system," says Yiannis Ampatzidis, an assistant professor of agricultural engineering at the University of Florida. "You have to invest a lot up front. A lot of small growers can't do that." Currently, Iron Ox is sending the food it produces to a local food bank and to the company salad bar.
I've always wondered if robots could patrol for weeds and bugs on a farm ... no idea how it works out (or not) economically though.
While this isn't going to replace industrial farming, it's a small step in the direction of autonomous crop management. However, what we should pushing to build robots to support outdoor horticulture farms. Monoculture is a weakness requiring heavy use of pesticides and herbicides which is harmful and unsustainable.
I for one would like to welcome our robotic farm overlords.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What happens to a world when one of the most significant employers of unskilled human labor (the food industry) goes all automated?
This has ALREADY HAPPENED in much of the world. 150 years ago, 70% of Americans worked on farms. Today 2% do. The world didn't end.
Will an increasingly automated skilled work force replace it? I seriously doubt it.
Why do you doubt it? It has ALREADY HAPPENED to over a billion people ... who have become the richest billion.
What I am saying is that we need a game plan for a very probable scenario.
You should start by reading a history book. For the last two centuries, moving a country's labor force off the farm and into the cities has be the key to prosperity, economic development, and higher living standards. It happened in the developed world long ago, and it is happening in China now.
Believing that agricultural automation somehow causes poverty, is astoundingly ignorant.
"Flog" can mean "sell or offer for sale". It is an informal usage, and is more commonly used in Britain than in America.
Indoor farming has to replace free and clean solar energy with grid energy ( ie. mostly coal ). Using solar power electricity in this instance would be very inefficient. Convert sun to electricity (loss), transmit over grid (loss), run grow lights (loss), is a horribly lossy system. Maybe 10% or less efficient system? So you replace 10 acres of lettuce farms with 2 acres of lettuce buildings. But you still need 10 acres worth of solar energy and you have to account for the loss. So you replace 10 acres of lettuce with 102 acres of solar and lettuce, but you didn't have to pay any lettuce pickers!
Nuclear is taboo, so it's going to be coal. It's not necessarily all bad though. If this uses less energy versus planting, weeding, and shipping to market, which are also fossil fuel based, then it would be a net improvement. However, it's very hard to capture all the externalities of the two approaches to get an accurate comparison. A grad student is probably writing their thesis on this topic right now.
This is true, but look a where those people went: the people freed up from agricultural work found new jobs in factories, warehouses, offices and the like. Now, even those fields are being automated at a fast pace. You're correct when you say:
But the problem scenario we're facing is different. Automation as its currently being developed takes jobs away not just from agriculture, but from the people who've moved to the cities as well. China is automating production at a rapid pace, replacing massive factories of hundreds of people working in assembly-lines and warehouses with semi-automated facilities staffed by few dozen engineers and programmers. In 20-30 years it's likely for example that nearly all warehouses will be almost completely automated, as will most production, this change has already begun. There are obviously new job description that have and will be created by this, but the general problem is that those positions generally require high education, and are not as abundant as the current low-skill jobs in manufacturing or logistics.
Cities have been the driving force of an increasing standard of living for the last century throughout the world as you pointed out. Here in Finland we were still heavily an agricultural society post WWII, after which we stared a rapid catch-up as people started flocking to the cities fast, as the rebuilding effort after the war created a lot of demand for labor in all kinds of industries. It was possible for someone from the countryside with very little existing education to move to a city and and find a job that, albeit monotonous, paid better than work in the countryside and allowed fast upward mobility, moving people from poverty or near-poverty to the lower middle-class.
We currently have about 200 000 more unemployed (mostly educated as we have a universal education system) people than open positions, because we've experienced a radical shift in the economy during the late 90s and 2000s: we stopped being an industrialized society and moved to a post-industrialized service and knowledge economy. Heavy industry is mostly gonei to countries with cheaper labor and what remains of it is highly automated and doesn't provide nearly as many jobs as it used to. The fall of Nokia was massive shock to the entire economy because its significance as an employer and a driver of growth was immense, even though most of the phones weren't even manufactured here. So we know have plenty of unemployed former industrial workers, engineers and so on that have had their jobs eliminated by the changes that have occurred.
The economy is not doing too bad though, we've got new companies mostly in software, like games companies (think Rovio (Angry birds etc) and Supercell (Clash of Clans)) and others that have done well and benefited the economy a lot, but the kicker is here: these companies employ nowhere near the amount of people that industrial positions used to offer, and competition for those positions is fierce. Even on the office side automation is cutting into many tasks like data entry that still employs a lot of people, but that is already changing. Programming and related fields are in high demand, naturally, but for the people whose jobs have disappeared, it's not feasible for all of them to retrain themselves as programmers, especially as even the ones who do will end up competing with a high number of younger people who're often more experienced in the field tha
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
What happens to a world when one of the most significant employers of unskilled human labor (the food industry) goes all automated?
Unskilled human labor will be used to produce Soyent Green.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Why does every farming automation/urban/indoor/shipping container/etc./etc. project grow leafy greens?
Is there really a huge demand or profit in that?
How about:
[...]
In other words, the expensive shit?
The preprocessed salad mix industry in America began in the eighties in Washington. A mix of some 30 different greens would go for twenty dollars a pound at the Pike Street Market. Tell us again how there's not a huge profit in that. Even just spinach at your local supermarket is up around eight bucks for a plastic tub, and spinach is relatively hardy and thus cheap to process.
Pound for pound, leafy greens are great earners. Possibly the best.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"