Yes, but production and throughput capacity, along with logistics of moving crops from the farm to a storage elevator are things that still need to be considered. Today's most advanced combines can harvest 10,000 bushels of corn per hour...you would need hundreds of robots in a field to even come close to that level of efficiency. One combine also needs about five semi-trailers driving around the clock to get all of the grain out of the field and into a storage elevator without slowing down the whole operation. Letting harvesting robots unload themselves into a truck one at a time would take weeks. There are some big changes that would need to take place to achieve what you are talking about.
Just use a thousand quadcopter drones, each one capable of harvesting a single ear of corn at a time and dropping it off on the elevator. It'd operate like a swarm of giant bees! :)
> There are some big changes that would need to take place to achieve what you are talking about.
No doubt about that. And I am not so naive to believe they will happen soon on a big scale ... but I hope to live long enough to see them come (while having my part in it)
Most of the grain and corn is used to feed livestock. So if you just turned those corn/grain fields into grazing land you wouldn't need the combine(as cool as it is.)
think decentralized. you don't need to produce that amount of corn in one area. if you have 10k households, you could produce the same level of food without the same environmental impact and less costs (subsidies aren't free) while having better food quality and diversity.
