How about harvest? Machines are quite specialized, how do you see that working out?

Bigger farms overall, which is anyway the trend so they utilize economies of scale. Or machine rentals if there is plenty of need from smaller farmers.

You might run into time of use contention unless you have a ver diversified crop neighborhood or adaptable robot. Don’t harvests usually happens at the same time for all the same species of crop in an area?

Unfortunately machine rental math does not work out for most of the specialised farming equipment in areas with changing seasons — when combine harvesters are needed (at the harvest time), they are needed for everyone within the same time window.

That’s a failure of imagination. Hordes of people used to do all the work, and Industrial Age engineering (thinking) replaced them with a combination of large, specialized devices and large, specialized farm layouts. It was more efficient for the technology of the time.

But we don’t build computing like that any more. Instead of large centralized single devices we use a large amount of protean hardware with various adapts (software).

Hordes of small devices can flood through the fields, using sensors to decide at any point what to do, and can use different effectors for different tasks at different times of the year, like the humans used to do.

You mean picking each ear/grain by a single device? rofl

I didn’t mean that — I agree that would be absurd!

I mean an autonomous device that picks a row, then does the same on the next row on the way back, then maybe unloads into a hopper and continues with the next couple of rows. And you don’t one, you have 50 or a couple of hundred of them rather than one huge combine harvester.

And if you have 50 of these platforms designed to go up and down the rows they could have been doing the planting at the beginning of the season (or desuckering your vines in spring or whatever) using a different tool, so your capex isn’t tied up in a few huge single-application devices, but amortized over a whole season. And when you have a fleet, if one fails and needs maintenance it’s no more of a big deal than when one server in a datacenter fails.

I was reading that and thinking family sized farm scale. If the machines are cheaper farms can be smaller and still justify buying a machine. Asian markets have quite a few small machines for managing rice crops.

Like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_transplanter https://sda-industries.com/equipment-parts/rice-harvester/

Compare that to "small" machines sold in the US. https://www.deere.com/en/harvesting/

wouldn't a monoculture help the robots, too?

But it doesn’t help us, and the robots are for our benefit. Make the robots go the the extra effort.

Contrary to bizzarre claims made earlier, robots don't actually work for free. In fact, they are more staunch about getting paid than humans are. They will stop working as soon as you stop paying them. Humans, on the other hand, will usually keep working for a while until they finally give in to the realization that you aren't going to pay up.

As a result, we're still going to optimize for the most productive use of robots, just as we do for humans.

That's false. Homogeneity makes it easier to harvest, process, and store crops. It also drives perfect competition which brings cost down on the commodity market.

Harvesting, processing, and storing, are human labor.

They involve human labor, just like every industrial process in existence. What's your point?

Yes, the GP’s reasoning is faulty (actually, “imperfect” would be a better term), but things aren’t as clear as you put it either.

Homogeneity helps with trading commodities, no question. And commodities reduce risk by allowing a very wide fan out on both sides of a two sided market…which has advantages and disadvantages for all participants.

More along your argument, it also lets the farmer use capital better in the short term (you buy the equipment you need for your monocrop).

But if you have multimodal devices you have the opportunity to take advantage of more flexibility. You can do crop rotation to use less chemicals or to take advantage of trends in the commodity market. You can have a different mix of crops for the same reason (half corn, half row crops, though they re typically worth less). You have more flexibility to adapt to climate change. The commodity markets can handle all this, in fact they help enable it.

This isn’t magic wand — crop rotation doesn’t make sense if, say, you have an orchard. But mechanization also caused us to abandon growing multiple crops in the same field, which can have benefits and improve yield. It was just way too labor intensive. If we go back to individual “labor” (automated in this case) it could be worthwhile.

But there are also costs considered: no flexibility, thus no way to hedge risk. Think weather, plagues and diseases, funghi whatever: If you single crop is vulnerable, now all of it is affected. The use of pesticides and fertiliser is also not free, and monocultures need a lot more of that. Furthermore the giant tractors needed for monoculture tend to damage the soil they drive on, and require the ground water table to be fairly low.

Certainly the logistical challenge of multiple small harvests of varying products is there, but this is definitely more manageable with robots and computers than without.

And for a small close to population centers, if they can supply multiple kinds of produce reliably, they might be able to make orders of magnitude more money on the local market than on the commodities market.