Or, say the 1st and 3rd largest distributors of grain are engaged in a disastrous war, trigging a global food crisis.

Or it would neglect the more land-intensive production of organic foods, cage free eggs, etc that require more land but produce more value for consumers seeking those statuses.

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You can do it by calorie.

Crop price inflation does not equal CPI though.

Dustbowl Part II: Electric Bugaloo

Republicans. You just described them to a T.

Imagine. The most advanced society to ever grace the solar system, and our food production technique has already decimated 30-50% of our top soil in just one human lifetime.

An agricultural system that will basically exhaust the planet's fertility in less than 200yrs (from the start of the green revolution) just seems monumentally stupid. But here we are. And that's not even mentioning what it's done to insect populations both above and below ground.

Amazon tribes and their creation of dark earth for their agricultural needs perhaps? Cover crops and green manure? No-till? Turning human waste into safe fertiliser?

There are plenty of options.

More tech is the most complicated and energy intensive solution

I think farmers need to become interested in ecology instead, and everyone with land should grow most of their own food.

>With extensible & flexible machinery there isn't even a reason to have a monocrop fields, you could grow 3 sisters as easily as corn if you wanted.

You could probably do that today, but there's subsidies that make corn favourable in the US, and entire supply chains built around corn and it's by-products.

>Denser & more varied crops would reduce the stress of pests and your drones running 24/7 could just mechanically kill most of them.

>When you do need pesticide or fertilizer it can be applied directly, dramatically reducing runoff.

Inter-row cropping for pest control is already a part of Integrated Pest Management.

Similarly, you can do this already, but IPM is a better approach to reduced pesticide use. You still need to change the regime, rather than just the delivery method, to solve the problem.

>Same as water, you could just inject it into the ground around the roots a few oz at time. It probably takes 10 oz to get 1 oz where you actually need it.

I'm not sure where that 10:1 ratio for water comes from, but Partial Rootzone Drying is already a technique used in some crops, and can be achieved with current irrigation techniques. You don't need teams of drones to do what a black plastic tube can do.

>The coolest benefit will be continual harvest, there is no need to plant & harvest the whole field at once. You can just pluck what is ready for market & plant where a spot opens up

Harvest and planting regimes aren't just dictated by the field, it's dictated by the need to get multiple crops into a growing season, and minimise the transport cost after harvest. having drones pick a row of a field at a time won't necessarily provide any benefit; if anything it'll actually reduce the crop since you're delaying planting at the beginning of the season.

>You could have an orchard with a dozen different fruits & grow corn below them with beans & other viney plants using them both as structure. Below all that where there is no light you could grow mushrooms.

orchards with multiple fruits is achievable today; a lot of orchards still utilise manual fruit picking, so it's not necessarily any better to have drones in that respect. You could probably use drones or robotics to kill off a lot of jobs, though.

The problem with things like beans growing around corn under orchards is that the beans and corn won't grow, because you've put them under a canopy. You're now maintaining multiple crops but not getting yield or a healthy crop from any of them. Conditions favourable for mushrooms are likely to cause root rot or fungal problems for the corn, or have potential negative interactions with the larger plants, and controlling conditions between the orchard and the beans and corn and the mushrooms (and the nutrient requirements for all three) is likely to be impossible.

That's not to say that it's not possible for symbiotic relationships between fungi and plants to exist; mycorrhizae are a thing and they help water and nutrient uptake in the host plant, but again - this is something already done today, without robotics.

>You'd ultimately be limited by light & that can be supplemented too.

Apart from the horrendous cost of electricity that this would add, the light pollution that would result would be massive as well. To get the level of light required on an industrial scale to extend a growth period would just be enormous.

Then there's the general downside to all mechanisation, which is spoilage/mechanical damage that results from some machinery.

In Vineyards, mechanical harvesting shortens the lifespan of the vines because of how fucking brutal the machines are. Fruit has to be crushed almost immediately, because the berries inevitably split and become open to infection or early fermentation - both capable of destroying a crop.

In softer fruits, machines simply don't exist for harvesting crops - not because the technology isn't there, but because the fruit simply gets damaged too easily. Raspberries or strawberries have only in the last 5 years had machines developed capable of harvesting them - but a grid of drones isn't part of the solution.

Even with robots, unless we're talking 100% indoor hydroponic solutions, they're simply not delivering gains outside of the current system. They might provide gains by supplementing current mass production processes, but bulk approaches are still the way forward for yield. The main benefit would be miniaturisation of harvest machinery, lower costs, auto picking and the ability to harvest faster (and perhaps AI integration to identify ripeness).

I agree with ending corn subsidies, though. That would do more for a lot of the above than any drones.

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At the rate we're going they'll need drones to pollinate crops as well.

The scene from The Matrix of the growing fields (where Neo learns from Morpheus that humans are cultivated/grown outside of the matrix) just popped in my head... Lol

People are definitely claiming it's just price increases/cash value and that production hasn't actually gone up.

>the real burning issue is using most of that land for animal feed. it takes vast amounts of water and uses up 100x the weight of crops per final meat food..

Not sure any of those points are correct.

On the water point, most sources that claim animal feed takes up huge amounts of water are including rainwater, which is not "used" in the sense of "was available for other uses but no longer is because it was used up in growing crops". In fact almost all that rainwater runs off or evaporates, which it would have done whatever that land was use for.

>100x

Source? I ask because the range I usually see is 4x to 10x.

That's not accurate. Increased prices does not necessarily equate to inflation. There are a thousand potential causes of price fluctuations that aren't inflation.

Yes, or if the inflation-adjusted cost per calorie has gone down over time (such as due to increased yields) it could actually be closer to deflation than inflation? I suppose presenting it in terms of calorie output instead of constant dollar output would be better in that way. But also showing inflation-adjusted cost per calorie over time would be interesting as well.

It may be easy, but it is also misleading.

It does not take into account price changes in either direction, for example.

It also does not necessarily make it clear whether more food is actually produced, only that the profits from food production have been increasing.

The chart doesn't show profit.

And yeah less land use and feeding a bigger population is more efficient.

Where do you get the idea that this is not an efficiency increase?

“Visually” (ie without paying attention to the scale numbers) the plot above make it “look” like land use and production both rose together in proportion from 1961 to 1999 then while production continued its rise that land use dropped.

However if we fixed the Y-axis to include zero. We’d visually see a very different “story”. Land usage would start high and say high with only some small “minor” variation across the plot and we’d still see production in $ trending up (as 1->5 is most of 0->5). In this plot it wouldn’t look like something massively different occurred before/after 1999. Instead it would be immediately apparent that the rise in $ over time probably has nothing to do with land use and is primarily driven by something else.

This is what some other comments here have pointed out, and that it may be “value” in $ increasing over time rather than actually producing more physical things per hectare.

Yeah seriously. A visualization isn’t bad just because it requires rubbing a couple brain cells.

The dollar amounts are in constant dollars. It's already inflation adjusted. The world is producing more food per hectare of farmland.

I'm curious as to what you mean? Agricultural food sources, regardless of destination, can still be grown hydroponically indoors. Benefits could include greater yield per acre and reduced need for pesticides.

Edit: I'm referring, of course, to the giant warehouse-style farms, not small single-family hobby ones.