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