What's wrong with ‘best practices’?

What's meant by ‘best practices’ and what could possibly be wrong with it? (Yes, I've used that phrase frequently myself, but I've been becoming increasingly uncomfortable with it.)

So I take ‘best practices’ to mean, of the practices now in use, those which come closest to achieving commonly agreed goals. This begs the question ‘commonly agreed among whom?’

In the context of agriculture, depending who you ask, goals that are considered to be ‘commonly agreed’ might or might not include such fundamentals as soil conservation, crop heterozygosity (in-species genetic diversity), and eliminating the use of broad-spectrum toxins, and might also include maximizing the growth and profit of certain corporations, as well as maximizing agriculture's contribution to alleviating the imbalance in imports versus exports.

Without going into detail, what constitutes ‘best practices’ can look very different depending on the goals to be served, but even leaving that aside there's still the issue of ‘best practices’ implying that the matter is already decided.

There's also a problem with ‘now in use’ as used above. As our tools and understanding evolve, what is now in use is almost certain to be replaced with something better, by some measure, eventually if not sooner. By focusing on even the best of what is now in use, we may miss the opportunity to make further improvements sooner rather than later, and, in the context of eroding soils and evaporating genetic diversity, in time to prevent further damage.

The focus of this blog is on the application of robotics to (addressing the many problems with) agriculture. I understand this in not obvious to many, both roboticists and high-concept gardeners and farmers (those engaging in organic / biological / biodynamic / regenerative / natural systems ... practices).

I don't see robotics as a magic bullet. It could all too easily simply accelerate the damage, in fact that's probably the default, in the absence of advocacy for making the technology serve higher aspirations, and without funding for achieving them.

What I do see is a deep well of potential for improvement, in tools, in the practices those tools enable, in our understanding of how and why to wield them, and, most importantly, in the scale at which those new tools, practices, and understanding can be applied.

Robots are machines that make decisions, sometimes very simple decisions but decisions nonetheless. They make those decisions on the basis of information gathered from their environments, and vary their behavior accordingly.

They are very good at tracking a multiplicity of details, and can learn from experience and carry out experiments. And, while they were until recently clumsy and slow, they are now gaining delicate touch, dexterity, and speed.

The potential I see is for replacing broad-acre monoculture with something better, much better, on the scale of millions of acres, but for that to happen in a reasonable time-frame developing the technology must become a higher priority than protecting currently profitable operations and arrangements, and so far the demand for this is both unfocused and lackluster. I'm doing what little I can to change that.

Check out The Permaculture Podcast, #1709: Regenerative Agriculture with Ethan Roland!