
The future of agriculture - ehudla
http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-06-09/factory-fresh
======
repliculture
While accurate on many of the recent developments, this article missed (as
many precision ag/genetics editorials do) some of the key drawbacks to
industrialized agriculture:

1\. Herbicide resistance. We now have weeds that are simultaneously resistant
to many different modes of action. Even if one were able to eliminate the
impact of pesticides on the environment, it is impossible to develop new
chemicals and stacked herbicides faster than evolution can find ways to work
around them.

2\. There are other drawbacks to monoculture ag, namely soil loss, lower
quality of soil structure/microbiota, loss of ecosystem services such as
habitat, etc. Increasing our yields per acre is great but we need to factor in
all of the externalities. I was glad to see mention of finding new ways to
associate rhizobia with cereals, but that's a long way off and for the time
being no one has figured out how to have agriculture avoid massive imports
(even in organic ag) of nutrients into the system.

3\. Exclusive focus on the biggest staple crops, with far more emphasis on
quantity than quality and producing food that is necessary for a well-rounded
diet.

4\. Nearly all of these solutions ignore the possibility of using ecological
interactions, unique spatial designs, intercropping, perennials and other
agroecological strategies to reduce weed pressure, increase nitrogen fixation
etc. These other techniques are far harder and are more difficult to
commercialize, but if one wants to tackle "hard" problems in agriculture,
those would be the ones to address.

Just to be clear, much good will come out of the technological developments,
but for the moment they're primarily tinkering around the edges when really we
need a whole-systems redesign for agriculture. I recently finished a PhD
focused on optimizing decisions given all of the uncertainty/variability in
precision ag systems, and what I ultimately concluded (at least for row crops)
is we still have a long way to go.

~~~
Jedd
Yes, the article is very much about agriculture, and all its attendant woes.

But we're not likely to see any story about a permaculture robot soon. Several
years ago I started to (on paper) design a system to merely plan and track a
permaculture-style farm/environment - and then abandoned it due to complexity
beyond my capacity to model.

Monocultures in comparison are painfully simple things to manage - part of why
they're so successful (commercially, at least).

~~~
TaylorAlexander
All I want to do is design robots for sustainable small and medium scale
agriculture. I've been working on robotics my whole life, and am very
interested in 3D printed robotics. I've designed a proof of concept 3D printed
remote control car [1] and I think it could be possible to design a good robot
for agricultural applications that people can build and repair themselves. I
design open source electronics for robotics and think we'd all be better off
if we owned shares in a community farm, and I want to make that kind of thing
possible.

3.5 billion people on this Earth are poor farmers. If we can design functional
open source agricultural robots that can be built by anyone with access to a
$300 3D printer (and I think we can) we could have a bigger impact on the
world than every new Silicon Valley startup from 2016.

There is a serious issue with the fact that capitalists don't make things for
poor people, because they can't afford to buy the solutions. [2] I don't want
that to stop me though, so I'm working hard to figure out ways of funding this
project that are functional even in our capitalist world. I think I spend more
time thinking about economics and social systems than I do about robotics,
since the technical solutions are trivial compared to the problem of getting
people to fund valuable non-profitable work. But I think that is possible too.

Right now I am working at a robotics startup and solving problems like 3D
perception, behavior, team management, handling my own bullshit, etc. My 10
year plan is to have a functioning system for homesteading with robots.

I'm really trying to make this happen.

[1] [http://makezine.com/projects/3d-print-badass-rc-race-
car/](http://makezine.com/projects/3d-print-badass-rc-race-car/) [2]
[http://tlalexander.com/restless/](http://tlalexander.com/restless/)

~~~
hactually
How are you finding the efforts? I'd be interested in knowing more about how
you intend on pushing it forward.

Do you need funding, ideas, people?

~~~
TaylorAlexander
Currently I'm funding development from my company [1], which was originally
funded off of Kickstarter and is now funded out of pocket until I can achieve
profitability.

In the future I intend to tap in to crowd funding again, probably with a full
robot as a development platform, and will check out grants and other sources
of traditional investment.

I could use people, ideas, and funding, in that order. Funding is forever
useful but I'm not willing to accept anything with strings attached at this
point. I think I'm at a stage now where I've fleshed out a good enough basic
plan that I need more people to work on it. I don't currently have bandwidth
to organize much but I figure I will some time in 2017. For now I'd love to
get a core group of people together to discuss the ideas, and see how we can
develop it further.

The general idea is a zero marginal cost society. That is, one more day of
society's needs can be serviced or produced at zero marginal cost. This would
eliminate the need to work for survival as there would be nothing anyone
strictly had to pay for. This requires that some technology be developed, and
that a good reduced-consumption culture is fostered that values true freedom
over endless consumption. The first incarnation would be an open source
farming robot project that would allow small farms all over the world to
support themselves with less of their labor devoted to farming. Millions of
people could be freed up by open source automation they built themselves or
purchased locally. Longer term this would be used to tell a story about how
automation and openness can free all of us from the need to work.

If you want to chat more about this, my email is in my profile and on my
website, below.

[1] FlutterWireless.com

------
fanquake
In Australia, there's a far greater yield benefit to be gained from farmers
buying a deep-ripper/mulboard plough(break the hard pan and allow root
growth), switching to CTF(prevent a hard pan from happening again), switch to
a no/minimum till system, spreading lime(correct soil pH) and maybe spreading
clay (mitigate soil erosion).

All of these practises are also "low-tech". You'd want to use VR maps to
spread your lime[0], and possibly clay (although it's fair easier to pick out
soil erosion by eye as opposed to varying pH), so it's probably not needed.

Once you've sorted out the fundamentals, then it makes sense to start more
precision ag. There's no point trying to grow a 5t crop when your roots can't
even get down to the soil moisture.

[0] Example VR lime maps, pick Lime from the available layers -
[https://hectare.ag/nooka](https://hectare.ag/nooka)

~~~
keithnz
I work for a company where we sell lots of Ag monitoring stuff. We are based
in NZ, but sell into Australia and are now also moving into the Central
Valley. Many get a lot of benefit from managing their water.

~~~
Thupli
Anyway you can point me towards more information about your company and its
instrumentation?

I moved to the Central Valley recently and have been searching in vain for
some technician type work in ag/soil moisture monitoring.

~~~
keithnz
we sell our soil moisture monitoring through...

[http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/](http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/)

------
tspike
_Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these
opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and
as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The
exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the
exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter
's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health -- his land's health,
his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter
asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to
produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult:
What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without
diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The
exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible;
the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but
his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the
exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order -- a human
order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery.
The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer
serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of
numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character,
condition, quality, kind._

This is a passage from Wendell Berry's _The Unsettling of America_. His
premise is that viewing agriculture as an equation to be solved is
fundamentally incompatible with maintaining the land's carrying capacity.

akiselev said in another comment, "How would you propose we study an ecosystem
where we can't even isolate and analyze the majority of bacterial, fungal, and
viral species let alone study or simulate their interactions with each other
and crops at the scale of even a square meter plot?"

We already have the knowledge of how to sustainably farm land without
irreparably damaging the ecosystem (although it is dying fast); we are simply
unwilling to work as hard as it would take to do it and are hoping for a
technological breakthrough from an expert to solve problems we can't even
verbalize.

~~~
akiselev
We can verbalize the problem: our population growth has outpaced our
investment in agricultural technology and infrastructure such that in order to
even try to feed everyone, we have to turn to ever more drastic measures that
are unsustainable or carry worrying existential risks. It is only in the last
decade or so that farmers are finally going full force in with tech that was
standard factory equipment thirty or even fifty years ago except now designed
for farmers. There is no technological breakthrough coming, we already have
all of the technology and the rate at which its costs are dropping is
monumental. Finally the low margin businesses that feed the human race are
able to afford it.

As the article talks about, this is largely because the old equipment and seed
manufacturers, the ones the farmers trust for their farm, are finally starting
to provide "smart" machinery and even cloud services with mesh sensor
networks. Combine this with genetic engineering of nitrogen fixating bacteria,
breeding guided by genetic screening, and all of the hard work that people
like Norman Borlaug have done and will do and we will be able to sustainably
feed our civilization without a high chance of running face first into an
ecological catastrophe.

~~~
ciconia
No, automating stuff and using technology to protect crop from "the vagaries
of nature" (what a ridiculous idea!) will not solve the main problems of
modern non sustainable agriculture, namely soil erosion, contamination and
monoculture vulnerability.

Despite constant technological progress, agriculture sadly remains one of the
top contributors to global warming. Unless the whole concept changes I really
don't see how we can avoid a global catastrophe.

------
akiselev
Agriculture is set for the next big revolution in the next few decades. Many
thousands of years ago, developments like horticulture, domestication, the
wheel, roads, and non-nomadic life styles collided together and built upon
each other exponentially, ushering the first agricultural revolution. Then we
had breakthroughs in trains, synthetic fertilizer, refrigerated cars, and all
of the other industrialization technologies in the 19th century, which again
changed the face of food and how it was grown and distributed. I'm sure I
missed a few eras but these are the two big ones.

Now we've got globalization resulting in much cheaper technology and expanded
markets, artificial intelligence and machine learning, ultra cheap wireless
communication, ubiquitous software, and last but not least, biotechnology. As
the latter advances, it will kick everything into high gear, as it already has
with companies like Monsanto and Climate Corporation. Even something as simple
as eliminating nitrogen from fertilizer through genetic engineering or
directed evolution would have a tremendous impact on the sustainability and
ecological impact of industrialized farming.

This is a good time for farmers who are always at the mercy of so many
variables which they are finally starting to dig into, quantify, and control.
Farms, especially smaller ones, are almost always in debt that they have to
borrow before every planting and a single underperforming harvest can wipe out
the business so all this added certainty is going to do everyone a world of
good.

~~~
fanquake
"..have to borrow before every planting" This is not limited to just small
farms. In Western Australia, farm debt has been growing 8% per annum since
2000. The average farm size here is ~3500ha (8650acres).

~~~
akiselev
I'm curious if Australia is a special case because of the drought [1]. It
began in earnest in 1995 and was named record setting by 2003 so I can imagine
the farms had to do a lot more borrowing and refinancing at unfavorable terms
in order to make it through more than a decade and a half of very low
rainfall. According to [2] the Australian government provided $4.5 billion in
exceptional circumstance assistance which included monetary payments and
interest rate subsidies. Even with that assistance I would imagine that the
drought hit Australian farmers really hard. I tried looking at the
agriculture.gov.au site for import statistics but couldn't easily figure out
if agricultural imports grew during that time period, and whether that hurt
the domestic farms as well.

It'll be interesting to see if California farms' debt balloons like this too
as they have to borrow more and more to pay for water rights and
infrastructure like wells. California is basically the US's fertile crescent
so maybe there will be a lot more subsidies and federal assistance just to
maintain food security as a national strategic goal.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought)

[2] [http://www.theage.com.au//breaking-news-national/minister-
de...](http://www.theage.com.au//breaking-news-national/minister-declares-end-
of-drought-20120427-1xpgi.html)

------
tridentlead
A lot of interesting work has been done by the Israeli hydroponics industry
around water conservation like some of the stuff in this article (as they grow
their food in very high temperatures).

~~~
ehudla
As well as high-tech/data science techniques in the quest for greater milk
production.

------
epicaricacy
FTA:

>RTDS has already created one commercial product, a form of rape

Whoa whoa whoa. Phrasing.

------
justaaron
Stopped at second sentence: "fortunately" Authors bias. Is this another
techno-utopian rant extolling the virtues of everything unsustainable in
modern society in prescriptive format for agriculture by urban white collar
workers who never touched soil in their life but take gadget buying advice
from Wired.com?

~~~
seizethecheese
The Economist is a publication that has always taken an editorial stance.

~~~
dredmorbius
And conceals the identity of that editor.

