A life goal of mine is to try to develop tools to help automate sustainable agriculture as much as possible. As I see it, part of the reason we keep on doing the monocultures is because the alternatives are just so dang labor-intensive, and anything that helps sustainable polycultures, agroforestry, etc. be more automated and less labor-intensive makes it easier for us to finally kick our current soil-destroying and ecosystem-obliterating habits.

[–] LibertyLizard 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Absolutely. I have a dream that autonomous farming drones will make far more labor intensive forest garden systems viable. They’re already far more productive, biodiverse, and resilient, they just require very high labor inputs, which is why they’re only used in parts of the world where labor is more available than machinery or other inputs. But if we can flip that equation by eliminating the labor component it’s all upside.

[–] schmorpel 4 points 1 year ago

Drones are one of the more useless gadgets to have been inflicted upon agriculture. I remember being, very briefly, part of a university project that had gotten a grant for a drone agricultural project. They ended up building a robot because the drone ended up being useless for the needed solution, but they still had to add a drone because the money was for an 'agricultural drone project'.

Drones can help in large monocultures to detect pest attacks and nutrient deficiencies. But a farmer can also detect these by walking the field and looking at the plants, and he can get so much more info like that! Problem is if he manages more hectars than he can comfortably walk.

Now, how many of the people currently working in bullshit jobs dream of having time and space to grow a garden? There's probably quite a few.

I used to be super afraid of the hard labor of food production before I finally took up gardening on a more consistent scale. My feeble attempts now produce food all year long. There's always something green or tasty or sweet or healthy inmidst the 7x15m green mess. Thing is, with a diverse garden (not a monoculture) any 80yo village granny around here who has learned the skill produces ludicrous amounts of food on land the size of a towel. It takes skill, and doing it right, and then it's decidedly not hard and becomes something you do in your spare time.

[–] schmorpel 4 points 1 year ago

because the alternatives are just so dang labor-intensive

Not really, but our math is skewed. Fossil-fuel based activities are less labor-intensive but much more energy-intensive. Our belief that we cannot survive without monoculture is because we compare labor apples with energy oranges.