For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

Re:For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now ... by pm90 on Monday January 06, 2020 @03:48PM (#21973138)

You make an interesting point. I think ideally what we want is:

* easy automation for those that need it; if corporations want to driverless tractors doing all their farming, so be it. They're responding to a market that is demanding a lot of cheap food.

* occupation as a choice; the productivity gains from automation shouldn't all just pile on to the people who made the investment; but it could be used to provide necessities to those that need them. So a small scale farmer, for instance, would not be competing directly in the same market as the corporation, and they wouldn't need to make a profit to do what they want to.

Human brains are great at seeing patterns; we shouldn't be wasting them on repetitive work that can be mechanized. Let people do what they want to without existential threats and see what happens.

In a certain sense, this is already true for the wealthy. The nature of wealth is that it gives you safety nets to fall back on if you fail at what you want to do. A lot many of the greatest artists came from wealthy backgrounds.

I would honestly want a lot more people creating art, video games, curing cancer etc. than have more people picking crops.

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Re:For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now ... by LinuxBender on Monday January 06, 2020 @05:35PM (#21974238)

I don't have any references for this, just the farmers I have spoken to, so take this with a grain of salt. The massive mono-crop farming apparently have the draw-back of not following some of the recycling processes that old school, small farm farmers did to keep the soil rich and diverse in nutrients. i.e. rotating out crops, bringing in animals to eat old crops, flowers, provide diverse waste product as fertilizer. Now it is all just bags of specific minerals added back in by machine, based on the bare minimum that they are required to by people that test the soil. Depending on who I talk to, I hear that there may be less than 60 harvests left before crops basically have little nutritional value. I've also heard that this is basically already happening, in that, crops have less nutritional value than they did say 50 years ago. But again, I don't have any references so this could all be nonsense.

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Re:For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now ... by monoideism on Monday January 06, 2020 @08:52PM (#21975918)

> small farm farmers did to keep the soil rich and diverse in nutrients

Some old school small farmers did this. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, they famously did not, leading to the dust bowl. That was caused by small farms, not industrial farmers.

But I totally agree that modern industrial agriculture only does the bare minimum to keep nutrient levels up.

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Re:For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now ... by uxhack on Monday January 06, 2020 @07:25PM (#21975261)

It is a bit more complex, old farming methods need to change as well, but not as much as Corp farming. This video explains regenerative farming which restores the soul and captures carbon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_NtNyvOyRM

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Re:For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now ... by nervousvarun on Monday January 06, 2020 @07:32PM (#21975309)

This is very likely not "nonsense": https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...

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Re:For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now ... by Nasrudith on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @01:08PM (#21982673)

Bertrisges law of headlines aside that article is highly suspicious given the sheer number of studies looking for health advantages of organic and finding jack shit concrete. It is a pile of innuendo that doesn't set out to test ita hypothesis.

It could be trivial as a few new virgin test carrot patches vs established farms and get telling results. Yet tellingly they didn't do that simple test for their hypothesis let alone correlaries like by assaying various characteristics like perhaps if slower growth speed has more to do with higher accumulation of nutrients than soil content.

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Re:For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now ... by Waterluvian on Monday January 06, 2020 @06:44PM (#21974881)

I've heard similar things. I don't think mechanization is at fault. I'd bet it's more the capitalism part forcing min maxing.

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Re:For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now ... by wolco on Monday January 06, 2020 @04:00PM (#21973251)

That's the piece we are missing. Sharing the benefits of automation as a feedback of the ecomonic system.

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Re:For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now ... by jelliclesfarm on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @02:35AM (#21977857)

Automated farms won’t be cheap. If it replaces hard manual labour, it will be replacing dirt cheap manual labour. No savings there.

Small farm automation is an urgent need. No one is doing it. Maybe in Europe.

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