This isn't exactly news in the sense of having been published in the last few days, but the field is still moving slowly enough that a year-old article remains relevant.
Professors Lie Tang and Kathleen Delate of Iowa State University have been developing a weeding robot, which, according to a just-published NYTimes article they hope to have in testing next spring.
Say goodbye to anything resembling wilderness in the parts of Africa that aren't desert, if a new projection of human population growth turns out to be accurate.
The difference between old predictions for Africa and the new projection is more than 2 billion people, for a total of more than 4 billion people and still growing by the year 2100, pushing the world population to 11 billion, despite a predicted decline in Asia.
So many mouths to feed, we must do everything possible to feed them, or so goes the argument, used to justify practices that produce maximum yield (in the short term), while glossing over their long-term and collateral effects – exhausting soils, polluting streams and oceans, further contributing to climate change, and ensnaring farmers in a cycle of debt.
What we absolutely must do is to protect remaining arable land – preserving and gradually improving its productivity – protecting it both from farming methods that sacrifice long-term health for short-term gains and from the urban sprawl that takes good land out of production, and to reverse that sprawl as much as possible, regreening land that had been covered in concrete and pavement.
We must also find a way to maintain production without ruining the land and the planet as a whole in the process.
But, just as importantly, we must recognize that what hunger there is at this time is caused by poverty and insufficient local production, not by a global shortfall in food production. Rather, the global market suffers from a glut of commodities and a failure to maintain prices at levels sufficient to cover farmers' costs of production. It also suffers in the sense of operating to provide for human need because some can afford to pay more for grain-fed meat, even for fuel produced from grain, than others can afford to pay for the grain required to produce it, despite low efficiencies of conversion.
So long as the use of agricultural commodities (not just crop wastes) for fuel competes with their use in the production of food, we haven't yet reached anything resembling a production crisis. Let's not allow ourselves to be rushed into foolish choices. The pressure of world population isn't a crisis we can fix and forget; it will be with us for a very long time, long past the year 2100. We must find ways of dealing with it that don't sacrifice all else on the altar of maximum production.
Frank Tobe, author of The Robot Report has been following the development of agricultural robotics for years. In an article published late last week and cross-posted on Robohub.orb, he brings together profiles of 27 or the most promising efforts he's learned about.
Technologies developed for cultivating food in space and Antarctica will very likely also prove to be applicable to indoor urban farming using artificial light, and perhaps even to open ground farming.
This is a more conventional approach to urban farming, examples of which are currently far more common than vertical farms.
I don't talk much about this, but I do think vertical farming will be an increasingly important contributor to food production in the future, and that it will be highly mechanized almost from the outset. My concern here is with the land that continues to be subject to the need for production and the desire for landscaping, pressures that vertical farming won't relieve soon. So long as we continue to manage land for our own purposes, we need to do a far better, far less destructive job of it!
While the interview touches on many topics, he has a lot to say about robotics in agriculture.
An extensive review article published on Nature's website, and described on the UC Davis news website, concludes that no-till farming only results in yield increases in dryland areas, and then only when combined with crop rotation and residue retention, and that it results in a yield reduction in moist climates.
While I have no reason to doubt the conclusions of the co-authors, as far as they go, I do have some concerns as to the scope of the comparisons they've made. However, not having read the full article, I can only pose questions and suggest considerations which may offset or even outweigh the modest yield reductions in moist climates, which they've noted.
It's hard to know where to start; this is such a complex subject. As practiced in western countries, no-till usually also means weed suppression by use of herbicides. It may or may not include residue retention, but if the residue is retained it is likely to be in rough form rather than finely chopped, or retained as the dung of the animals that grazed on it after harvest, never as well-distributed as the residue was in the first place. It may or may not include crop rotation, but almost certainly does not include polyculture (also called intercropping), which has become an all too rare practice.
Allow me to back up a bit, and consider an assumption, as expressed by one of the co-authors: "The big challenge for agriculture is that we need to further increase yields but greatly reduce our environmental impacts." Certainly we need to vastly reduce the environmental damage being done by modern agriculture, but just how much do we really need to increase yields. Population growth estimates not taking into account the predictable reduction in fecundity that accompanies prosperity will result in alarmism, but the reality is that what benefits the global economy has to offer the poorest are slowly finding their way to every corner of the planet, and it's reasonable to think that the world population will plateau, if not at ten billion, then perhaps at eleven or twelve billion. Of course, there is hunger now, even starvation, much of it happening in the dryland areas surrounding the Sahara. Yield increases in this region would be particularly helpful, but are complicated by competing uses, as fuel and as animal feed, for the residues which should be left in the fields. Realistically, the bottom line comes down to this: Can we afford to sacrifice long-term fertility for short-term gains in yield?
That question begs another, does the article published in Nature include any long-term studies, by which I mean at least twenty years, preferably longer? Not only does tillage gradually burn through (literally oxidize) soil organic matter, eventually effecting water absorption and retention and nutrient availability, and increasing the energy required for ongoing tillage as the soil becomes denser, but also it takes time for an ecosystem of animals and microbes to develop that can efficiently incorporate crop residues into the soil, particularly in fields that have a long history of routine tillage.
Were any options other than simply leaving residue in the field or grazing considered? Are there any cases of fine-chopping residue during harvest? What about initially removing everything but the stubble and returning it after processing it through animals (as feed), through anaerobic digestion (producing methane gas for fuel), and/or through composting?
Were the costs of production considered? No-till generally involves the cost of herbicide and its application, but tillage is an energy-intensive operation, and over the long term diesel will only become more expensive. If the fuel must be grown, shouldn't the percentage of the overall crop area required to grow it be deducted from the net yields? How does no-till look after performing that calculation?
Nor have we yet seen the full benefits of no-till, because we have yet to develop equipment appropriate to it. Western civilization is so accustomed to tillage that we tend to be blind to assumptions made stemming from a fundamental assumption that tillage is the foundation of agriculture. We see equipment built to perform tillage at work and don't think twice about it. There have been some adaptations – spraying equipment that is only as heavy at it needs to be for that purpose, and oversized tires for heavier equipment – but nearly all of the equipment in use, even in no-till operations, still deals with land as a bulk commodity, measured in acres per hour, rather than at the level of detail required to, for example, selectively harvest one crop while leaving several others, intermingled with it, undisturbed.
Until recently, this could only be accomplished by hand labor, but with the advent of computing using integrated circuits, and its combination with sensory hardware, sophisticated mechanisms, and software to match the problem space (together comprising the field of robotics), the question of whether such work can be mechanized has been transformed into one of how soon. A significant obstacle to this development is cultural, in that we've all but forgotten how to tend land in this manner, and may have to reinvent the practice in order to program the machines. Certainly many in our agricultural colleges and universities will require remedial education.
James Gosling, famed software developer who has spent his last several years working at Liquid Robotics, was recently the featured speaker at a CMU Robotics Institute seminar. My purpose here is not to discuss that talk as a whole, but to focus in on particular issues he discussed which are more generally applicable.
At 52:10, he begins the discussion of fault management, describing, among other things, how LR relies heavily upon features of Java that support continuous operation in the face of problems that would cause software to stop abruptly in other environments.
At 54:30, he discusses communication modes and data prioritization, which is an issue for LR because real-time transmission can cost them as much as $1/kilobyte, for a data rate of ~50 baud.
At 57:46, he briefly discusses security issues, which he says he could have talked about at much greater length.
At 58:43, he mentions Java's write once run anywhere advantage, and how LR makes good use of it in writing and debugging their software.
At 1:05:17, he responds to a comment from the audience regarding inclusion of a basic feature, camera panning, the consequences of various approaches to crafting hardware to support it, and how LR has worked around the problem.
At 1:07:59 he launches into the topic of parts availability, or lack thereof, noting that chips LR would like to acquire are only available as part of circuit boards, or in large lots, which constrains their choices in hardware design.
This last item, the lack of availability of what are, in a volume context, standard parts, is my main motivation for going to the trouble of posting this. It holds back not only the development of robotics, but electronics startups of all sorts, and, to a lesser extent, hobbyists (because in most cases those complete boards are what they need).
The list of problems is uncomfortably long, and all too familiar...
Most of these problems are addressable by means of better practices...
The problem with this set of practices is that, for the most part, they require more attention to detail and don't scale as easily as conventional practice, so they are hard to justify in terms of the farmer's bottom line.
Automation in the form of small robots, operating without constant supervision, and capable of going about farming the right way, could close that gap.
Unfortunately, for most of us, this is a collection of technologies that largely have yet to be created.
On the other hand, the sooner we make it a priority, the sooner it will happen, and the sooner we can get on with the job of healing the planet.
While, in the long run, we should seek to optimize agricultural practice for the improvement of soil health, along with other considerations, in the near term we should be glad for any improvement at all, since the default to be expected from ‘modern’ agriculture is some degree of lost fertility with each passing season.
Traditional practices, like crop rotations including deep-rooted plants like clover, alfalfa, and buckwheat, and like allowing livestock into fields after harvest to browse on the debris left behind, can be enough to tip the scale from degradation to marginal improvement, and can be applied now, without any change in the machinery in use.
We should do what is a matter of differing management choices now, while continuing to work on the technology that will eventually make radically improved techniques possible.
