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barsoap@lemm.ee 2 days agoI don’t think that tractors will ever go the way of the dodo and when you have proper logistics, say a reasonably dense S-Bahn type rail network that can also handle shipping individual containers, a tractor and a trailer is all you need as you only have to haul to the next logistics hub and there’s no truck load even 100 year old tractors can’t tow: When you can pull a plough through soil torque isn’t something you need to worry about, 20 horses at 5km/h go vroom.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
It’s hard to guess the future, but I imagine once we have automated farming, things like tractors will look a lot different. Right now, farmers need versatile equipment for a variety of tasks (plow, till, plant, etc), whereas an automated farm would probably prefer dedicated machines for each. The farmer would become more of a mechanic/planner than the one directly running the equipment.
I don’t know how far out that is, but I imagine once we get reasonable self-driving cars, farming will be the next up.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Modern tractors already self-drive on the field, fertiliser is applied in tightly controlled doses based on aerial analysis, that future is already there. You don’t plant or fertilise at the same time as you plough so it makes sense for those things being attachments, not integrated machines. The reason combine harvesters are dedicated machines is because they do so much in one go it doesn’t fit into a (sensibly sized) attachment.
You could also have drones distribute that fertiliser but you can’t work the soil with them, and you already have a tractor to work the soil with so you can just as well use it to apply the fertiliser. There’s also tons of odd lifting and transporting jobs on farms, that’s why there’s forklift attachments. You’ll need something with torque, low ground pressure, PTO and attachment points and well that’s a tractor.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
My understanding is that the current design is merely an evolution of regular human-controlled machines, and they still need to be able to operate w/ a human inside. Once you remove the human from the equation, the design space opens up quite a bit, and you optimize for different things. Since things would likely be battery powered, maybe you’d want more, smaller devices so they don’t take as long to charge.
I don’t know, I’m not a farmer. My point, however, is that once we trust machines to operate w/o humans in control, things are likely to change a lot.
HelixDab2@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Gotta say, this should be a huge red flag for everyone. Soil quality is declining sharply, and fertilizers simply aren’t making up the difference. Switching to robots farming will almost certainly accelerate this.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Under solutions, there, is written “compost” and “animal manure”. That’s fertiliser. Import-dependent agriculture is a whole another topic and I didn’t want to get into it, but long story short, no matter how good and natural your soil management is you can’t expect to export nutrients all the time and not develop a shortage. You can pull nitrogen out of the air, that’s nice, but you can’t do that with phosphate and minerals in general. Good news is that good water treatment plants will pull phosphate out of the waste water.