Distributed + automated agriculture?

[conwy]

In my own naïve way, I'm trying to grapple with the problem of food production in the 21st century.

AFAIK human history can broadly be divided into three segments:

1. Hunter-gatherer -- very few humans, vast resources, directly catching/picking and eating food (e.g. fishing, hunting game, picking berries, etc).

2. Agrarian agriculture -- more humans, limited resources, competition, independent decentralised farms producing enough to feed people in the local area, serfdom and slavery, most people working extremely hard and very long hours while getting barely enough food to survive.

3. Industrial agriculture -- we are here -- enormous number of humans, even more limited resources, massive inequalities of quality of life between countries and regions, giant factory-farms, machinery, scientific farming, genetic engineering, inter-dependent global supply chains, highly centralised food production making people in developed countries into pampered but helpless cogs in a machine which they cannot control and which could fail catastrophically at any moment (and in some countries already is failing).

When you compare 2 and 3, two key differences seem to be:

A. Decentralised (2) vs. Centralised (3)
B. Manual (2) vs. Automated (3)

If we decide to regress back to (2) then we will have to go back to all the problems of (2). We will all have to do incredibly strenuous work, labor for very long hours, be practically slaves/serfs and highly disposable, and be constantly vulnerable to threat of attack/invasion. This seems like a step backward and not desirable if we can help it. In fact, you might even consider it a fate worse than death, as it's basically a life of constant terror and torment.

So can it be better? Can we come up with some (4) which combines the virtues of (2) - sustainability and (3) - quality of life?

It seems like we need to solve these two problems of Decentralisation and Automation together in one solution.

A. Decentralisation -- it seems like modern industrial agriculture is dependent on vulnerable supply chains of fertiliser. Can we find ways to either produce fertiliser locally or grow food that doesn't depend on distantly located fertiliser? Also, can we come up with forms of defence from attack/invasion that function in a co-operative and decentralised and trustless manner? Or perhaps some combination of centralisation and decentralisation such that we can centralise national defence (military) without becoming overly reliant on one central authority?

B. Automation -- to prevent us from spending our lives doing back breaking torturous work, could we take some of the automated systems that are used in centralised industrial agriculture and apply them locally? For example, do we need to look into developing robots, automated pumps, climate systems, computerised tools, etc. which are tailored for a very small scale, maybe even the scale of a single individual or small family? Basically, could we take the technology of industrial agriculture (3) and figure out how to apply it to decentralised industrial agriculture (4)? Maybe such a solution could eventually be productised and sold in mass to consumers, so that it integrates seamlessly into the modern capitalist system and doesn't require a massive socio-political upheaval.

Thoughts?

[conwy]

(duplicate)

[conwy]

This video seems to give a good overview of the state of play with vertical farming:

Examples of the kind of products/solution I'm looking to:

• https://www.infarm.com/

• https://www.80acresfarms.com/

• https://www.aerofarms.com/

The more energy-intensive crops like Rice and Wheat will require further technological development.

But I find it an exciting prospect that if/when some of these solutions come online, they might help us to survive the coming decades.

Even if the cost of growing food in this way goes way up, at least our time would be spent earning and income and building/maintaining these machines, which is still far preferable to going back to back-breaking agrarian work.

If people understand it in this way, knowing what the alternative is, maybe they could be willing to make big sacrifices in lifestyle/demands in order for this kind of technology to successfully displace the current model.

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Also... the bear case from Bruce Bugbee. However in a more recent lecture (2021) he seems more optimistic - seems that if the cost of artificial light keeps going down due to increasingly efficient LED lights and clean energy to power them, we might have a chance of indoor agriculture being able to replace traditional farms.

[white belt]

There is no simple answer. The food math only works with current population levels as long as Haber-Bosch is fixing our nitrogen. Without fossil fuels I think the estimates are that the earth can only feed ~1.5 billion people from what I remember in previous threads. Decentralization and automation won’t solve that piece, but they might still help.

Vertical farms require a lot of infrastructure. At a certain point I feel like it makes more sense to grow crops appropriate to a region and/or move away from uninhabitable regions rather than using a lot of resources to try to grow food that is not suited to that climate.

Related threads:

viewtopic.php?t=11726

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=5416

[Dream of Freedom]

Can we find ways to either produce fertilizer locally or grow food that doesn't depend on distantly located fertilizer?

Sure it's called manure or humanure.

[sky]

It is possible to grow one's food without external fertilizer inputs. One method that was developed for this purpose is Grow Biointensive gardening method. http://www.growbiointensive.org/

There is a booklet "A Path to Peace and Sustainability: Growing Soil, Food and Seed in as Little as 1,000 square feet" that lays out how one would do this.

The 8 Principles of Grow Biointensive:
1. Deep Soil Preparation
2. Close-Plant Spacing
3. Composting
4. Carbon Farming
5. Calorie Farming
6. Companion Planting
7. Seed Saving
8. Whole Systems Perspective

I would add Crop Rotation to this list, it is included in the gardening method but not listed as one of the 8 Principles.

The way that they reduce or eliminate the need for external fertilizers is to grow crops which produce waste plant matter which can be composted to provide a nutrient rich compost addition to the garden beds, known as Carbon Farming. The types of plants they use for Carbon Farming are: Quinoa, Barley, Fava Beans, Oats, Wheat. These are not the only plants used to create compost, but they are the most productive from the perspective of biomass for composting purposes. Between 30% and 50% of the garden is used for Carbon Farming.

The booklet has a highly detailed nutritional summary of a diet from garden produce. The author states that:

"With a basic level of skill and soil fertility, a complete and sustainable diet can be grown in as little as 4,000 square feet.
With an intermediate level of skill and soil fertility, this can be done in as little as 2,000 square feet.
With an advanced level of skill and soil fertility this can be done in as little as 1.000 square feet."

Skills required include:
Double digging beds
Knowing when and how many seedlings to start in flats.
Timing the seeding and planting of many species of plants
Arranging seedlings to maximize use of space
Watering appropriate amounts and appropriate times
Knowing the ideal time to harvest
Composting and soil conditioning to improve soil quality through growing microorganisms and adding nutrients
Crop rotation to prevent blight and to optimize uptake of nutrients
Logging, weighing and record keeping to track results of gardening methods

The tools required to garden by hand include rake, spade, fork, hand-fork, transplanting trowel and wooden flats. I would add record keeping tools such as pencil and notebook.

Many of these item could be enhanced and made easier by automation. Planting, sowing and harvesting calendars, logging software, specialized compost turners and aerators. Perhaps some type of Farmbot cultivator: https://farm.bot/

[Dream of Freedom]

Just a few mild criticisms on the segments that you laid out:

• You ignore pastoral food production which has different qualities to agrarian agriculture.

• I question your view of agrarian agriculture being decentralized. Would ancient Egypt be industrial they took a centralized top-down approach or ancient rice cultivating which tends to involve a community because of the nature of producing rice would that be industrial or agrarian? There isn't much automation to speak of in either.

[Hristo Botev]

You ignore pastoral food production which has different qualities to agrarian agriculture. [/list]

I'm in the middle of a Joel Salatin binge, so perhaps not surprisingly I second the mild criticism that the discussion of agrarian agriculture overlooks pastured livestock. Pastured multi-species rotational livestock with a kitchen garden.

[MidsizeLebowski]

I’d propose that agrarian agriculture and industrialized agriculture exist on a continuum and in most developed countries small to midsize farms are already operating at a midpoint. Farmers like a Fukuoka who hold an edible ecology perspective come to mind when we discuss the need for back breaking labor.

Venturing a guess... suspect 21st century food production to look like a hybrid of 2 & 3 where things are decentralized, crops are climate appropriate allowing for reduced labor/inputs, silvopasture systems and the like replace monocrop orchards and CAFO, and much of the seeding, harvesting and processing is mechanized/automated leaving farmers working relatively traditional hours. Think serfs listening to podcasts via AirPods as they toil in the field.