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The future of agriculture
Topic Started: Jun 12 2016, 10:34 AM (579 Views)
Stef
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The Economist - Technology Quarterly - The future of agriculture
Quote:
 
If agriculture is to continue to feed the world, it needs to become more like manufacturing, says Geoffrey Carr. Fortunately, that is already beginning to happen.
TOM ROGERS is an almond farmer in Madera County, in California’s Central Valley. Almonds are delicious and nutritious. They are also lucrative. Californian farmers, who between them grow 80% of the world’s supply of these nuts, earn $11 billion from doing so. But almonds are thirsty. A calculation by a pair of Dutch researchers six years ago suggested that growing a single one of them consumes around a gallon of water. This is merely an American gallon of 3.8 litres, not an imperial one of 4.5 litres, but it is still a tidy amount of H2O. And water has to be paid for.

Technology, however, has come to Mr Rogers’s aid.
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. – Aesop
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Stef
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Just come back from a very nice though short visit to Milan.
Not sure whether topic belongs here, but I found it very interesting, wanted to share it.
If needed please move it wherever required. :)

Stef
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. – Aesop
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George Aligator
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From the OP:
In the short run, these improvements will boost farmers’ profits, by cutting costs and increasing yields, and should also benefit consumers (meaning everyone who eats food) in the form of lower prices.

I used to run a mid-sized dairy farm and observed the technology impact at first hand. As in other sectors, the rapid expansion of technology in agriculture increases productivity by tilting the resource balance away from labor and towards capital. The new technology is expensive. It costs money but pays for itself by increasing productivity and reducting the worker hours needed.

As this new approach to farming spreads to plaes like India, South Asia and sub-Sahara Africa and Central America, it is going to have a very destabilizing effect. Apply this technology and robotic pickers to Central American coffee plantations and family farms will be pushed to the wall and bought up by the international investment capitalists that control export, roasting, and distribution.
Conservatism is a social disease
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Stef
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Indeed GA.
And there's the dilemma.
I am struggling to envisage the sociological "balances" my grandchildren's children will need to be living with.
Technology is expanding at an ever increasing rate and that, overall, is a plus for society.
But if it "helps" only some societies, or sections of a society, the result will be growing global pressures.
This is one of the reasons I found the article interesting.
It highlights a simple reality. Automation will expand in all areas of human activities. And that should give us pause for thought.
Hopefully we'll know how to handle the inevitable impact this will have on all society by creating new "balances".
What I am seeing to date makes me, at times, feel somewhat "nervous" about our capability/willingness to grow our global sociological maturity at the speed our growing technological advances will require. Yet, to keep sociological pressures within manageable limits, we'll need to grow our social global maturity or risk the consequences.
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. – Aesop
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Robert Stout
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May I recommend a worldwide 32 hour, 4 day work week for developed countries???....The French will support it.......... :dunno:
Jesus can raise the dead, but he can't fix stupid
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Siberian
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Robots, who will replace humans first in industry, then in industrialized agriculture, then on Earth - will not need agriculture. :)
Really, there are plenty of people in rural areas not required any more for production of the same amount of food. The same is in industry. Where all these people are going to be employed?

And the biggest consequence of it will be further depopulation of the West and later - replacement of people there by immigrants, who breed more with less productive technologies in agriculture :)
Edited by Siberian, Jun 14 2016, 03:55 AM.
Goood morning GULAG!!!
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George Aligator
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For centuries, income has been linked by one system or another to the production of value. As more and more value is produced by technology (including robots) rather than human labor, we face what will be the biggest crisis since the Industrial Revolution over two centuries ago, perhaps since the dawn of civilization itself.

It seems inevitable that we will shift the linkage of income away from value production and towards social utility. Caring for the environment and for people who cannot care for themselves produces little new value but is extremely important for human society. Should the human race manage to make that transition we could end up living in the most elegant paradise imagined since Adam and Eve fooked the first one up so long ago. Inshallah
Conservatism is a social disease
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