Let’s change the pace of the day….
There is a report that some of the agribusiness has taken on the chore of bring automation to farming…..but will this help the price of food or will it just mean more profits and less safety?
Jeremy Ford hates wasting water. As a mist of rain sprinkled the fields around him in Homestead, Florida, Ford bemoaned how expensive running a fossil fuel-powered irrigation system on his 5-acre farm was—and how bad it was for the planet. Earlier this month, Ford installed an automated underground system that uses a solar-powered pump to periodically saturate the roots of his crops, saving “thousands of gallons of water.” Although they may be more costly upfront, he sees such climate-friendly investments as a necessary expense—and more affordable than expanding his workforce of two. It’s “much more efficient,” says Ford.
A growing number of companies are bringing automation to agriculture, reports the AP in a broad look. It could ease the sector’s deepening labor shortage, help farmers manage costs, and protect workers from extreme heat. Automation could also improve yields by bringing greater accuracy to planting, harvesting, and farm management, potentially mitigating some of the challenges of growing food in an ever-warmer world. But many small farmers and producers across the country aren’t convinced. Barriers to adoption go beyond steep price tags to questions about whether the tools can do the jobs nearly as well as the workers they’d replace. Some of those workers wonder what this trend might mean for them. A few examples of the tech:
- Frank James grew up on a cattle and crop farm in northeastern South Dakota that has had to cut back on farmhands due, in part, to lack of available labor. They swear by tractor autosteer, an automated system that communicates with a satellite to help keep the machine on track. But it can’t identify the moisture levels in the fields, which can hamstring tools or cause the tractor to get stuck, and requires human oversight to work. “You build a relationship with the land, with the animals, with the place that you’re producing it. And we’re moving away from that,” says James.
- Extreme heat, drought, and intense rainfall have made detasseling corn in the Midwest even harder. Jason Cope, co-founder of farm tech company PowerPollen, created a tool a tractor can use to collect the pollen from male plants without having to remove the tassel. It can then be saved for future crops. “We can account for climate change by timing pollen perfectly as it’s delivered,” he says. “And it takes a lot of that labor that’s hard to come by out of the equation.”
I do not foresee this benefiting society and its people but rather increasing profits and allowing the greed to grow deeper and deeper.
Any thoughts?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
The trends described in agricultural automation show potential to benefit society, although they do also serve the agricultural industry. Here’s a breakdown:
Overall, while agricultural automation has potential to benefit society by improving sustainability, resource efficiency, and climate resilience, these gains need to be balanced with the interests of small farmers and workers who could be affected by the transition.
My opinion, when this is all said and done is that whenever experts start messing with food production systems and procedures, they end up making the process worse than it was before they got their hands on it… and, of course, in america today– profit is king….screw the little guy.
Profits before people is always king. let them eat cake…..chuq
As a former farmer myself, I can tell you flat out that automation, robotics and improvements in technology is the only way we’re going to be able to continue to feed a human population in excess of 7 billion at a reasonable cost. Are companies going to make money off it? Of course they are. But that’s how the system works and how it has always worked.
Right now we have an extremely serious labor shortage in the agricultural sector. That’s been the case for years now. And it isn’t just a matter of low wages. You could offer $25 or $30 an hour plus decent benefits and you still wouldn’t be able to find enough people because many, even most people out there, believe that farm labor is not just physically hard but demeaning as well. There is this attitude out there that has been with us for centuries that farmers and farm laborers are peasants, badly educated, too dumb to get a “decent” job, etc.
Without the advances in technology: crop genetics, improvements in machinery, irrigation systems, fertilizer technology, herbicides and pesticides, etc. that have been made over the last 200 years, we wouldn’t be able to support a world population half the size it currently is.
I have a problem with GMO….I mean a tomato should not last a month on a shelf without decomposing. And the taste….there is no taste. chuq
That’s actually due more to conventional plant breeding than GMO. Commercial tomatoes were like that long before genetic manipulation was possible. They breed strains of tomato that are tougher to be able to handle shipping and handling, at the expense of taste an texture. Those hard tomatoes you see in the stores may be red, but they aren’t actually ripe as well. They’re picked green and then gassed with ethylene gas to change the color.
I am uncomfortable with GMO as well. I know it’s been tested and is supposedly safe and all that, but there are often unintended consequences
I had a tomato that was beautifully red and after a month it started sprouting through its skin…..like some scifi movie…..chuq
Wow, that is creepy. My primary concern with GMO plants is that they tend to, oh, contaminate the gene pool, so to speak? And it ends up causing a lack of diversity, crowding out other varieties of the species that have desirable traits, traits that we might actually need in the future to keep the plants resistant to disease.
It becomes an ethical issue as well. Monsanto and other companies that produce genetically modified seeds are viciously aggressive in “policing” their “intellectual property”. A lot of farmers (including my family) would save seed from the better quality grain that we grew to plant the following year. That’s illegal with GMO plants. Monsanto was particularly aggressive. They would send out scouts to sample soybeans, and if there was even a hint that one of their “patented” genes were present they’d sue the hell out of the farmer claiming the farmer had saved seed from a previous crop illegally. There was a huge stink up in Canada some time ago over that when it turned out that the Monsanto soybeans’ pollen was drifting for miles contaminating non-Monsanto soybeans, making them test positive for the Monsanto gene. Monsanto, of course, kmew this was happening (allegedly) and had adopted that tactic in order to scare farmers into buying its seed in order to avoid being sued. The company denied it vigorously, of course but still ended up paying out a lot of money to make the case go away.
I will see if I can find the photos I took….and yes it was very creepy. chuq
As Grouchy says, people do not seem to want to work on farms now. This is a real issue in the UK at the moment, and the machines will continue to be invented and used to overcome the lack of willing labour. I can’t see any other option.
Best wishes, Pete.
It is most likely the only answer….but it still sucks. chuq