The Role of Robots

 Matt Yglesias has a piece at substack on the need for robots, attacking the thesis that robots will take away workers jobs.

I didn't study it, but it did cause me to think about farming and robots. My impression is that robots and AI are making rapid progress. Robotic milking in dairy, self-driving tractors, flame-throwing weeders, big data and precision agriculture. At least in the world of farming I don't see robots taking jobs.  What seems to be happening is two-fold:

• reduction in immigration, which mostly supply the low-end work. When TFG tries to build a wall reducing immigration, that increases the incentive for robots. When robots are developed that reduces the incentive for immigration.  
• reducing the number of real farms--most obviously in the world of dairy. The investment in robotic milkers means you need a bigger operation to make it economical, which means the big farms drive out the small dairies. 

Precision Agriculture

 Wired has a long piece on precision agriculture. Divisions between automating current operations, like John Deere's version of their 14 ton tractor, and new paradigms, like small weed-pulling robots, between field crops and fruits and vegetables, and dairy.  

Did you know legal marijuana is the fifth most valuable crop grown in the US?

Tecnology Review and Food

Since I don't get the hard copy version of Technology Review, I'm not sure whether it's one issue, but this is the notation they attach to the beginning of a number of posts on their website:

"This story is one of a series about how hidden innovations produce the foods we eat at the prices we pay."

The big story seems to be: How to train a weeding machine. Does the work of 30 people. It broadens into a discussion of the problems of digitizing vegetable production, starting with Landsat back in 1972 (I remember ASCS had a guy in Houston working on Landsat for a while--big dreams back then.) 

There's also  one on GMO maize in Kenya A comment here--the farmer notes in passing:

"But I still have more crops than some of my neighbors, who sometimes recycle seeds and don’t have very much at all."

That one sentence seems to me to encapsulate the challenges for the small farm/food movement people.  It points to an evolution over decades which will lead to modernized production ag growing the bulk of our calories, with smaller operations producing for the niches. 

A Case for Intensive Farming: the Netherlands

National Geographic has a piece on Netherlands precision farming.

From his perch 10 feet above the ground, he’s monitoring two drones—a driverless tractor roaming the fields and a quadcopter in the air—that provide detailed readings on soil chemistry, water content, nutrients, and growth, measuring the progress of every plant down to the individual potato. Van den Borne’s production numbers testify to the power of this “precision farming,” as it’s known. The global average yield of potatoes per acre is about nine tons. Van den Borne’s fields reliably produce more than 20.

I've viewed with skepticism reports about the Netherlands high value of exports, figuring it was mostly flowers of all kinds.  But it's the top exporter of potatoes and onions. I've been skeptical about proposals for vertical farming and urban farming, but this article is changing my mind. 

What I'm taking as the bottom line is intensive farming can work in the market place.  It's not clear what the additional equipment and the inputs cost, but the adoption of the techniques in the Netherlands means you likely have positive cash flow. 

I do retain a bit of skepticism--Netherlands is cited as being in the top exporters of potatoes and onions, both of which strike me as unlikely to be exported over long distances because both have high water content.  

Sharing Agricultural Data and the Rewards Thereof

Here's a DTN/Progressive Farmer piece on software packages, "real estate robots" to evaluate farmland, particularly its value.

"The beauty of the services is that they can help you assess a potential rental farm's crop and yield history, protest your land taxes, look for comparable sales, gauge real-time property values, or identify who owns the farm you covet -- all from the comfort of your personal computer.

By logging onto these free sites, you know boundaries on every parcel, what economic rental rates are and which farm is owned by a brother and sister in Florida, Sherrick said.

Meanwhile precision agriculture is building data on fields.  And somehow I think there's still a prohibition on FSA releasing some crop data outside USDA.