Comment on Breakthrough: "Electronic soil" boosts crop growth by over 50%
bassomitron@lemmy.world 6 months agoIf that was the case, why isn’t every industrial farm doing it?
Comment on Breakthrough: "Electronic soil" boosts crop growth by over 50%
bassomitron@lemmy.world 6 months agoIf that was the case, why isn’t every industrial farm doing it?
rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
The Venn diagram of farmers and early adopters is harry potter’s glasses
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Have you seen all the crazy stuff get up to? Geospatial analysis of fields, drones for spot fertilizing, the acres covering water systems, turning waste crops into ethanol, etc
Thrashy@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Farmers are quick to jump on an opportunity to refine their current processes in ways that reduce their inputs and increase their outputs, espescially when it only costs them a few grand in capital investment (drones for surveying and spot treatment) or hilariously over-subsidized by the government (bioethanol). Wholesale change from the literal ground up, not so much, and perhaps understandably so – farmers have massive, often generational investment in infrastructure and equipment for farming in specific ways and with specific crops, operate on narrow margins, and don’t have much available liquidity to change things up on a whim. For that reason, major innovations in agriculture don’t usually come from farmers; instead they usually come from land-grant university research.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
There is definitely a back and forth between academics and industry in the agriculture field! The technological adoption spectrum was actually defined when looking at farmers.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Poor lad thinks farming IRL is like his Stardew Valley save
rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Which is why “rurality” is a synonym for modernity, and why “rural electricity/telephone/internet access” reminds you of a high tech data center. Ok.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
The farmers where I live were 100% the first to get fiber to the home, by nearly half a decade.