[dorfuss]

Do you remember that Major Major's father made a good living by not growing more alfalfa than anyone else in the county?

But let's put things in order:

I think your assumptions are wrong. First I would deal with the automated driving, then with the farming business.

Automated cars are not only for people who don't enjoy driving their car towards the setting sun and enjoying freedom. Literally everything you can buy, eat and enjoy in life relies on transport. I would guess that none of the consumer goods you purchase are produced where you live - maybe with the exception of a bakery, restaurant and your local Starbucks. Automated trucks are simply a huge thing. You will be able to drive them non stop, distribute the traffic more reasonably etc. Passanger transport is another thing, no less important. A lot of white collar workers have to visit their clients in person and spend many hours driving. Their talents and competences are not used properly. If they don't have to focus on the road, there could be a huge boost in their productivity. Even if they would just be able to relax more during the business travells by watching films.

Self driving cars are not just a matter of leisure, but of significant reduction of cost of transport that everything relies on.

And why do we automate in the first place? - to free human energy. Sitting in a car and driving thousands of kilometers is just dumb. Necessary, but dumb and tremendously repetitive. Once the machines can do it, the man can focus on specialised tasks that only humans can do. I believe that is the major task of CS in general - to free human potential.

I have nothing to do with farming, but I believe your diagnosis is mistaken. Food production has been automated so heavily, that a single farmer is able to produce an incredible amount of food (it means farmers invested a lot in their current technology). Moreover, as indicated in the beginning, US gov. and other governments in Europe PAY farmers for NOT growing food. And food production is often not very profitable and has to be heavily subsidized. Farmers operate on very very narrow profit margins and therefore investment has to be able to cut (already low) production costs. Robots are sophisticated machines and the maintenance cost is high. On the other hand manual labour on farms is very cheap. I believe that the benefits of automatisations in the farming industry are still not good enough to balance the cost.

Moreover, there is virtually no shortage of food, especially in the west. The last big starvation (not caused by politics) in Europe was a matter of the end of 19th century. While transport is an ever growing business - we want more stuff, faster, delivered from further away, food producers are rather more concerned about governments keeping the subsidies and import tariffs to supress supply.

Considering all of the above - food production is not such a big problem, and its share in the economy is very very small.

Having said that, of course there is a potential market for even more machines and automation, but I am not surprised that the farmers are not interested in it at the moment.

[jelliclesfarm]

Alfalfa..a cautionary tale and perversion of farming when sustainability is lost.

It is a mainly a story about California. The golden state that supplies over 1/3 of all vegetables in the USA..and about 2/3 of nuts and citrus. A state that has been ravaged by drought and yet grows thirsty crops like citrus, almonds and alfalfa.

In the 1970s, a farmer from the Midwest started exporting cubed hay to Japan. To this day, japan is one of the largest importers of alfalfa hay from the United States. The Middle East and esp UAE imports hay too. But the biggest importer of hay from the USA is China.

In the early 2000s, there was no hay exports from California. But it was the high season in Silicon Valley with iPhones and cheap plastic toys coming into our ports in giant shipping containers. Instead of sending them back empty..someone thought it was a good idea to sell hay to china. It made sense from a logistics pov because shipping hay would be win win for china as well as the USA.

Around this time in the early 2000s, china was barely importing 2% of our hay exports. Fast forward 15 years, china is the largest importer of alfalfa hay and takes almost 30% of the market share(if not more).

This happened because of the increasing prosperity in china and there was a spike in demand for milk. While dairy was once a luxury, now the prosperous middle class wanted milk for themselves and their families. But when they started dairy industry, they found that china was also losing arable land and there was no grazing land for the cattle. The aquifers were drying up and whatever water available was polluted with industrial wastes. Importing from USA was a good idea as alfalfa was high in protein and the best feed for milch cows.

How did this affect us? Imperial valley in California grows a lot of alfalfa for hay..you can do multiple cuttings in a year and fill all those empty containers returning to China. It was so profitable and the logistics made so much sense that it was cheaper to send hay to china than to the dairy central of California, Tulare.

Now American dairy farmers are competing with china for American alfafa. The pricing becomes competitive and the dairy farmers were going under because there was no way to make money on milk. Dairy industry is another out of control rodeo show but that's another story.

And then the drought happened. Alfalfa being a thirsty crop took a lot of water because it was more profitable to grow hay than food. But with little price wiggle room, we were selling alfalfa to china and exporting it to other countries cheaper than it costs because we were not taking into account of the cost of water. DURING a DROUGHT! How fucked up is that? It became a popular wry thing to say that our cheapest export was our water. We were selling water in containers to others while we were being asked to cut down our water usage and water rates was raised.

To make this all even more interesting, farmers were letting fields go fallow during the drought because water was too expensive. Citrus and almonds were becoming so expensive and they were our main exports. Many farmers lost everything and started selling pieces of their land. For which there were few buyers because there was no water!

And yet..why do we have this delusion that food is 'cheap and plentiful'. Because our food comes from South American countries..our quinoa..our gmo soy comes from destruction of rain forests and the break down of indigenous people from other places that are poor.

Our mega farms grow commodity crops like corn and exports what we do use for our hogs. Pound for pound, pork or meat is more expensive wrt water than vegetables. And here is the perversion, our biggest buyer of corn is Mexico. A country with a rich and diverse cultural and food history of corn..heirloom, native corn..has to buy gmo corn from USA while their own corn strains are disappearing. Their farmers grow tomatoes and chives for us because it's cheaper.

And round and round we go..a tangled web we weave...it's so messed up..I can pick up from here and tell you a 'dairy story' or a 'quinoa story' or a 'soy story'. It never ends and it doesn't have to be complicated.

Water needs to be treated as the precious resource there is..in a hundred years, countries might as well go to war over water not oil..and secondly, sustainability is key. Local food production is key. Govt needs to be reined in..they are taking away control of farmers over what they do best..they are making them into beggars and debtors. Lesser the govt interferes with our lives..and our food..it's better.

Nothing is sustainable..from the population of china ..to California exports to imports from Latin America.

And yet we imagine that all is well..food is plentiful and cheap..and food production is not something to worry about. I worry about it. A lot.

[jelliclesfarm]

That's so funny. I actually do have a story about alfafa(which I will narrate separately after this).

First: I agree. Automation of driving is important but so is tech in farming. Like I said before, it's not a competition. Why not both? My gripe is that they want to get to farming automation after driving automation is perfected. Which seems wrong to me because they are looking at farm bot tech as a vehicle. As a farmer, I feel that it's entirely wrong approach. But that's my experience and opinion. Ymmv.

Secondly: farm production is semi automated for commodity food production. Can you live on grain alone? Can you live on sugar alone? Soy and corn are produced for livestock feed and for ethanol.

You say human labour is cheaper than machines. It makes me cringe. What about the human potential of the Mexican labourers picking strawberries and destroying his health? What about the thousands of farmer children who are sick from pesticide residue and dust pollution from excessive tilling? What about thousands of farmers and neighbours with asthma and auto immune disease just because they live in a rural area that gets tilled hence releasing fungal soil spores and orchards are sprayed.

Food and it's production is cheap only because the terrible price we pay for it is invisible.

You see the human potential being saved because of drivers autonomous cars can do something else. I see human potential being saved when a labourers doing repetitive manual tasks bent over and their spines vibrating from tractor driving(which btw isn't cheap..) are free to do other things. People who don't own state subsidied massive farms or have money to buy their own land are bonded labour. It is no different from slave labour.

Farmers aren't interested in it because no one has presented them with a viable produce. If I had a row crawling weeder, I will produce more and make more money. If I am presented with a million dollar automated tractor that I don't understand, can't afford and won't fully replace all my labour needs, why would I even look at it?

There isn't enough done for ag tech and what is being done isn't appropriate technology. Farmers are the 'technical lead' because what we know about soil ecology and plants and methods is the technical nuts and bolts. MBAs and money guys and engineers are designing and creating farm tech which when I showed to real farmers invited peals of laughter. It's just not appropriate tech because engineers are not farmers. We speak different languages.

And food production IS a problem. We bring in a lot. California feeds a lot of USA and we are paying for it..a terrible price. Florida grows tomatoes on sand and pesticides. The rest of USA will pay for it.

Ok. Alfalfa story coming up. It's not a funny story but rather an outrageous one. Sorry..I have some pending chores and will be back with it soon! Watch this space!