Rural Australia also just has a desirability problem. Rural towns regularly offer significantly above market rate for GPs and teachers, but rarely ever fill the posts.
Agriculture is bottom of the barrel business because no political power worth its weight allows price gouging. Food has to be kept as cheap as possible because otherwise the economy doesn't work. The workaround for this is subsidies, but those don't scale. You can't agriculture your way into Google Ads, the money printing machine.
Could you elaborate on "subsidies don't scale"? In the US, farm subsidies are a huge chunk of our budget and, to the best of my understanding, help keep food prices low. I'm not informed enough to know if it's an inefficient solution though.
that is incorrect. 2023 US Payments to agriculture [1] were $10.972 billion. That is 0.04% of GDP or ~0.697% of the federal budget[2] for 2023. It spiked slightly in 2020, but has been a small portion of the budget for a long time.
I guess it's a matter of perspective, I know 0.7% isn't the biggest item in the budget but it's a fairly large line item to my mind. Either way I still wonder what the "does not scale" comment meant.
Edit: re-reading my comment, I regret my word choice, "a huge chunk" is obviously incorrect.
I'm a regular Joe on the internet, with a regular job.
And regarding agriculture and your comment, that's how people with actual power think.
Think of almost all major advances we've had, especially in terms of reducing costs. The vast majority of cost savings (and therefore improving quality of life for the average person) can be summarized as:
* put plastic (and fossil fuel derived materials) in EVERYTHING: if you don't believe this me, go to Amazon (or any supermarket, really) and pick a random product category and see how much the non-plastic version costs, frequently it's much, much more expensive (kudos to stainless steel and aluminum products frequently still holding the flag; but coming with other downsides, obviously)
* (more relevant to our discussion): industrialize human suffering and/or general environment degradation (push production to countries where labor and environmental/sustainability laws are lax and abuses are rampant): if you don't believe me, go to Amazon (or any supermarket, really) and pick a random product category and try to research their supply chain to see if it's produced ethically and sustainably
Oh, for bonus points, a huge percentage of the world economy works on BOTH at the same time.
Would I be correct in assuming that your name comes from 'The Point'? What a classic!
I also appreciate your point about the reality of agriculture, I think too often people miss just how narrow the margins there are and why farm life has always been so financially unstable. It used to be the weather that could make or break you, and it still is, but not world commodity markets, the price of fuel and fertilizer, and trends in a number of areas can all do it as well. Add in the top-down pressure to keep prices low and bottom-up pressure to target migrants and... what a rough mix.
I dream that AI robotic drones can reduce our dependence on vulnerable monocultures. Rather than a monoculture processed by million dollar combine harvesters using bulk techniques, a polyculture harvested by a swarm of small cheaper drones that work at the individual plant level.
I think this isn't going to hapen. The economy of the scale favors monoculture and it combines well with automation. The most likely outcome will be that combine harvester not requiring a driver and a synchronous operation of multiple harvesters as a robot swarm such that much bigger fields than currently possible could be worked: monoculture at a much bigger scale.
- Because you're pulling multiple crops off a field instead of one, the value of those crops is significantly higher.
- The crop is much more resilient. The different crops will have different tolerances to drought, disease, insects, wind and other disasters that commonly affect farming.
When farmland was cheap you could increase your profits per employee by buying more land and bigger machinery. But these days farmland is expensive and farmers are concentrating more on increasing yields per acre. In my area farmers spend > 10x as much per acre on inputs like fertilizers and pesticides than they used to in the 90's.
Polyculture will be hard and expensive, but if it lets you double profit per acre, farmers will do it.
The two crops are corn and soybeans. Everything else is decimal dust. I'm not sure how much sense it makes to mix them within a plot, as opposed to mixing them by crop rotation.
Also, all of the crops have to be herbicide resistant to coexist with corn and beans.
It makes a lot of sense to mix corns and beans. Corn is usually more profitable than soybeans, but they are rotated for soil health reasons. If you planted both together you wouldn't have to rotate.
Corn & beans are 2 of the "three sisters", the traditional native American agriculture technique.
You'd want to grow a shade tolerant bean, like cornfield beans. 80% of soybeans are fed to animals; the pigs won't care what type of bean they get fed.
Already pretty much the case. They may have a driver as a monitor/troubleshooter but for planting and harvesting it's all optimized down to the inch with GPS guidance steering the machinery.
Two of my friends who farm already have self driving planters and harvesters, controlled by GPS, that lay down different kinds of seeds and fertilizers depending on location within their fields. The farmer is there to fix things.
There is a solid equilibrium in a commercial monoculture and artisanal and subsidised polycultures for insurance. The transition will never be easy. But at least the groundwork is there.
I mean it does, until it doesn't and you loose all your crops/soil/water.
Monocultures degrade the soil, and you need to put more and more input in to make sure grow. Because there is no ground cover between crops, wind takes away your soil. If you mess up/mistime your pesticide/herbicide input, you'll loose all your crop. The more you grow, the more the soil turns to sand, requiring more fertiliser input, which mean more costs.
If you take the yield per m2 of an allotment, and compare it to a really high quality agricultural field (ie Lincolnshire fens, or some prime land in the USA.) the allotment will have a much higher yield with less input. I don't have the figures on hand, but you'll need to turn to the bearded hippies at the henry doubleday to get precise numbers.
If, through automation, you could have three or four crops in the same field, providing cover all year round. you could then start to keep your soil, because the wind cant get at it (crop dependant). you can grow sacrificial crops for pest control, meaning less pesticide input. This means more worm, which will stop flash flooding (more water permeability without ploughing)
But all that requires high speed "pick and place" weeding/harvesting machines. Those are going to be complex and expensive until scale kicks in (think how complex tractors were, or threshing machines)
The future we’re already in should be characterized as cheap complexity. As an example, in manufacturing one offs were cost prohibitive, now it’s close enough to mass manufacturing cost that in many cases there is no point taking that extra step. Also people are increasingly concerned with food provenance, I would love to have a local automated greenhouse growing hairloom vegetables.
There aren't any combine models that sell more than a few thousand units per year. Individual parts in the combine benefit greatly from mass manufacturing, but the combines themselves don't really. Small harvester drones on the other hand could have a much larger sales volume, and really take advantage of mass manufacturing.
I hope it goes that way bit I expect the opposite. They way big ag doesn't show much respect for nature I expect them to go even more into monoculture and using robots to wipe out all insects and plants they don't like.
In developing countries, farming is left for those who has no opportunity or ability to do any other better work. Often uneducated, poorer, living in remote places without basic facilities.
Result? The farmers are forced to do extensive use of chemicals in farming, low nutrition, high yield GM/hybrid varieties and adulteration of whole foods. The food that comes out is laced with chemicals, poor quality varieties. And the urban consumer pays for their negligence of the farmer.
Access to information even for the global poor is almost universal. But like the old joke about the ag extension agent trying to get a farmer to improve his practices with information, “Heck, I don’t farm as well as I know how to today.”
Something like AI hallucinated produce? Random taste tomatoes anyone? Leaving the joke aside, probably GMO will probably accelerate with the help of AI and will still be called GMO foods.
GMO was already adopted before the resistance even manifested. It was a little bit more crude in the early days. Irradiate a field and select desirable traits among the mutants.
And the cattle farmers massively benefit from these things. There are now custom monitors being put on to cattle that constantly measure how much they eat, how much they walk, body temp, etc. If they fall out of expected range the system will call a vet automatically to come treat them as they're obviously sick. This is keeping the cattle healthier and the production numbers high.
Farmers are also really getting into things like drones for pesticide application as it's faster, more accurate, and has less waste.
It's happening whether or not people want to believe it, from Texas up to Illinois/Wisconsin and everywhere inbetween.
hey, if you want to get away from big tech and you're not scared of rural life -- farmers need IT folks. They have racks of Supermicro servers on premises that need maintaining because they can't trust the cloud // internet can be unreliable. They have sensors and repeaters on the field perimeters that need maintenance.
There's a lot of IT work to be done in rural America with a slower pace of life if you're not afraid of coexisting with country folk. For those of us that grew up there and migrated to the city for corporate IT jobs -- I expect we'll be going back to our roots and serving our communities with these skills instead so we don't have to deal with AI screened jobs and take-home programming tests
This is effectively my "dream" job for semi-retirement at the moment. I don't need to make top dollar any longer, but I crave doing something "real" that actually matters and I work for/talk to people who actually make useful things for humanity. I still need a decent income to pay for toys, hobbies, and time off work until I hit retirement age.
A contracting IT job trekking between a few farms and monitoring them remotely sounds pretty great to me! And right up my alley in terms of skillsets and interests.
If you’re talking about racks of servers, you’re talking a pretty large farming operation…they’re a bit rare. And those kids of farmers would like to stay in the community with well-paying jobs, and so communities try to raise their IT specialists locally and tend not to outsource even to the local Big City if they can help it. Farmer kids have ag in their blood and can support IT more effectively with that homegrown subject expertise.
conradfr – 8 hours ago
I'm sure they are not alone.
fouronnes3 – 7 hours ago
mycall – 6 hours ago
Scoundreller – 8 hours ago
I think they meant where labour costs are more than their ability to pay
ViscountPenguin – 6 hours ago
kjkjadksj – 5 hours ago
oblio – 7 hours ago
ericyd – 6 hours ago
owie829 – 5 hours ago
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/L312041A027NBEA
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M318191Q027NBEA
[3] https://imgur.com/a/dwgS0m6
ericyd – 1 hour ago
Edit: re-reading my comment, I regret my word choice, "a huge chunk" is obviously incorrect.
Onavo – 6 hours ago
SoftTalker – 5 hours ago
alexashka – 6 hours ago
I suppose destroying society for profit is top of the barrel for people like you.
JumpCrisscross – 5 hours ago
Wat. You really don’t see any technology that created win-wins?
oblio – 5 hours ago
I'm a regular Joe on the internet, with a regular job.
And regarding agriculture and your comment, that's how people with actual power think.
Think of almost all major advances we've had, especially in terms of reducing costs. The vast majority of cost savings (and therefore improving quality of life for the average person) can be summarized as:
* put plastic (and fossil fuel derived materials) in EVERYTHING: if you don't believe this me, go to Amazon (or any supermarket, really) and pick a random product category and see how much the non-plastic version costs, frequently it's much, much more expensive (kudos to stainless steel and aluminum products frequently still holding the flag; but coming with other downsides, obviously)
* (more relevant to our discussion): industrialize human suffering and/or general environment degradation (push production to countries where labor and environmental/sustainability laws are lax and abuses are rampant): if you don't believe me, go to Amazon (or any supermarket, really) and pick a random product category and try to research their supply chain to see if it's produced ethically and sustainably
Oh, for bonus points, a huge percentage of the world economy works on BOTH at the same time.
EA-3167 – 6 hours ago
I also appreciate your point about the reality of agriculture, I think too often people miss just how narrow the margins there are and why farm life has always been so financially unstable. It used to be the weather that could make or break you, and it still is, but not world commodity markets, the price of fuel and fertilizer, and trends in a number of areas can all do it as well. Add in the top-down pressure to keep prices low and bottom-up pressure to target migrants and... what a rough mix.
bryanlarsen – 7 hours ago
bgnn – 7 hours ago
bryanlarsen – 7 hours ago
- Because you're pulling multiple crops off a field instead of one, the value of those crops is significantly higher.
- The crop is much more resilient. The different crops will have different tolerances to drought, disease, insects, wind and other disasters that commonly affect farming.
When farmland was cheap you could increase your profits per employee by buying more land and bigger machinery. But these days farmland is expensive and farmers are concentrating more on increasing yields per acre. In my area farmers spend > 10x as much per acre on inputs like fertilizers and pesticides than they used to in the 90's.
Polyculture will be hard and expensive, but if it lets you double profit per acre, farmers will do it.
bgnn – 7 hours ago
analog31 – 5 hours ago
Also, all of the crops have to be herbicide resistant to coexist with corn and beans.
Now, for things like veggies, sure.
bryanlarsen – 5 hours ago
Corn & beans are 2 of the "three sisters", the traditional native American agriculture technique.
analog31 – 5 hours ago
bryanlarsen – 5 hours ago
analog31 – 5 hours ago
SoftTalker – 6 hours ago
Already pretty much the case. They may have a driver as a monitor/troubleshooter but for planting and harvesting it's all optimized down to the inch with GPS guidance steering the machinery.
KaiserPro – 6 hours ago
troupo – 6 hours ago
KaiserPro – 5 hours ago
https://www.farmads.co.uk/product/buqcr-27-06-2025-104659/ its more that people nick those units (well used to, im not sure how nickable they are nowadays)
0cf8612b2e1e – 6 hours ago
analog31 – 6 hours ago
JumpCrisscross – 5 hours ago
KaiserPro – 6 hours ago
I mean it does, until it doesn't and you loose all your crops/soil/water.
Monocultures degrade the soil, and you need to put more and more input in to make sure grow. Because there is no ground cover between crops, wind takes away your soil. If you mess up/mistime your pesticide/herbicide input, you'll loose all your crop. The more you grow, the more the soil turns to sand, requiring more fertiliser input, which mean more costs.
If you take the yield per m2 of an allotment, and compare it to a really high quality agricultural field (ie Lincolnshire fens, or some prime land in the USA.) the allotment will have a much higher yield with less input. I don't have the figures on hand, but you'll need to turn to the bearded hippies at the henry doubleday to get precise numbers.
If, through automation, you could have three or four crops in the same field, providing cover all year round. you could then start to keep your soil, because the wind cant get at it (crop dependant). you can grow sacrificial crops for pest control, meaning less pesticide input. This means more worm, which will stop flash flooding (more water permeability without ploughing)
But all that requires high speed "pick and place" weeding/harvesting machines. Those are going to be complex and expensive until scale kicks in (think how complex tractors were, or threshing machines)
atmavatar – 5 hours ago
> you'll loose all your crop
Is there a way to tighten your crops after they become loose or beforehand so they don't loosen in the first place?
KaiserPro – 5 hours ago
cjbgkagh – 7 hours ago
bryanlarsen – 6 hours ago
vjvjvjvjghv – 7 hours ago
bryanlarsen – 7 hours ago
Grad students will work on the problem for the ecological benefits. Then big ag will scoop it up for the profit motive.
upcoming-sesame – 6 hours ago
zkmon – 5 hours ago
Result? The farmers are forced to do extensive use of chemicals in farming, low nutrition, high yield GM/hybrid varieties and adulteration of whole foods. The food that comes out is laced with chemicals, poor quality varieties. And the urban consumer pays for their negligence of the farmer.
onecommentman – 4 hours ago
https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24...
Access to information even for the global poor is almost universal. But like the old joke about the ag extension agent trying to get a farmer to improve his practices with information, “Heck, I don’t farm as well as I know how to today.”
theodric – 5 hours ago
frainfreeze – 7 hours ago
Scoundreller – 8 hours ago
Will we see AI-free food? Will it become a part of being “organic”?
tartoran – 8 hours ago
kjkjadksj – 5 hours ago
akomtu – 7 hours ago
erikerikson – 8 hours ago
Not agriculture, cattle
seadan83 – 8 hours ago
"Animal husbandry, is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, or other products" [2]
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_husbandry
erikerikson – 8 hours ago
throwaway070625 – 7 hours ago
Farmers are also really getting into things like drones for pesticide application as it's faster, more accurate, and has less waste.
It's happening whether or not people want to believe it, from Texas up to Illinois/Wisconsin and everywhere inbetween.
hey, if you want to get away from big tech and you're not scared of rural life -- farmers need IT folks. They have racks of Supermicro servers on premises that need maintaining because they can't trust the cloud // internet can be unreliable. They have sensors and repeaters on the field perimeters that need maintenance.
There's a lot of IT work to be done in rural America with a slower pace of life if you're not afraid of coexisting with country folk. For those of us that grew up there and migrated to the city for corporate IT jobs -- I expect we'll be going back to our roots and serving our communities with these skills instead so we don't have to deal with AI screened jobs and take-home programming tests
vjvjvjvjghv – 7 hours ago
phil21 – 6 hours ago
A contracting IT job trekking between a few farms and monitoring them remotely sounds pretty great to me! And right up my alley in terms of skillsets and interests.
onecommentman – 3 hours ago
lostlogin – 8 hours ago
SideburnsOfDoom – 6 hours ago