Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

Re:Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also p... by freeqaz on Friday July 10, 2020 @03:14PM (#23795175)

It is a hard problem. Historically, people often grew plants in heterogeneous environments because they grew their own crops. Even if it wasn't _all_ of their food, it was still a subset of their food. But it was very labor intensive.

The scale of monocrop farming today with modern tractors is a very new field as well (no pun intended).

With machine learning specifically, I can see a robot arm being able to farm a lot of mixed crops. This is already happening for the most labor-intensive crops like strawberries[0]. Robots are cheap and can work 24/7.

I think it just a matter of time before computers advance enough to be able to perform the basic, repetitive tasks that humans are able to.

0: https://www.therobotreport.com/strawberry-picking-robot-make...

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Re:Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also p... by Fiahil on Friday July 10, 2020 @03:42PM (#23795521)

This very interesting piece might be of interest for you : https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/how-to-pick-a-pepper/

It took one of the protagonist ten years of testing to find a machine capable of harvesting special-bread peppers. The breakthrough your are looking for isn't for software engineering only - or even at all -. It's a combination of mechanical engineering, biology and hacking. Venture-led startups often lead to short-lived niche products made to impress silicon valley. It's not sustainable, and it's not the future.

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