[avdlinde]

How about harvest? Machines are quite specialized, how do you see that working out?

[tastyfreeze]

I was reading that and thinking family sized farm scale. If the machines are cheaper farms can be smaller and still justify buying a machine. Asian markets have quite a few small machines for managing rice crops.

Like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_transplanter https://sda-industries.com/equipment-parts/rice-harvester/

Compare that to "small" machines sold in the US. https://www.deere.com/en/harvesting/

[gumby]

That’s a failure of imagination. Hordes of people used to do all the work, and Industrial Age engineering (thinking) replaced them with a combination of large, specialized devices and large, specialized farm layouts. It was more efficient for the technology of the time.

But we don’t build computing like that any more. Instead of large centralized single devices we use a large amount of protean hardware with various adapts (software).

Hordes of small devices can flood through the fields, using sensors to decide at any point what to do, and can use different effectors for different tasks at different times of the year, like the humans used to do.

[m2f2]

You mean picking each ear/grain by a single device? rofl

[jajko]

Bigger farms overall, which is anyway the trend so they utilize economies of scale. Or machine rentals if there is plenty of need from smaller farmers.

[IndrekR]

Unfortunately machine rental math does not work out for most of the specialised farming equipment in areas with changing seasons — when combine harvesters are needed (at the harvest time), they are needed for everyone within the same time window.

[nico_h]

You might run into time of use contention unless you have a ver diversified crop neighborhood or adaptable robot. Don’t harvests usually happens at the same time for all the same species of crop in an area?