A life goal of mine is to try to develop tools to help automate sustainable agriculture as much as possible. As I see it, part of the reason we keep on doing the monocultures is because the alternatives are just so dang labor-intensive, and anything that helps sustainable polycultures, agroforestry, etc. be more automated and less labor-intensive makes it easier for us to finally kick our current soil-destroying and ecosystem-obliterating habits.
because the alternatives are just so dang labor-intensive
Not really, but our math is skewed. Fossil-fuel based activities are less labor-intensive but much more energy-intensive. Our belief that we cannot survive without monoculture is because we compare labor apples with energy oranges.
Absolutely. I have a dream that autonomous farming drones will make far more labor intensive forest garden systems viable. They’re already far more productive, biodiverse, and resilient, they just require very high labor inputs, which is why they’re only used in parts of the world where labor is more available than machinery or other inputs. But if we can flip that equation by eliminating the labor component it’s all upside.
A life goal of mine is to try to develop tools to help automate sustainable agriculture as much as possible. As I see it, part of the reason we keep on doing the monocultures is because the alternatives are just so dang labor-intensive, and anything that helps sustainable polycultures, agroforestry, etc. be more automated and less labor-intensive makes it easier for us to finally kick our current soil-destroying and ecosystem-obliterating habits.
Not really, but our math is skewed. Fossil-fuel based activities are less labor-intensive but much more energy-intensive. Our belief that we cannot survive without monoculture is because we compare labor apples with energy oranges.
Absolutely. I have a dream that autonomous farming drones will make far more labor intensive forest garden systems viable. They’re already far more productive, biodiverse, and resilient, they just require very high labor inputs, which is why they’re only used in parts of the world where labor is more available than machinery or other inputs. But if we can flip that equation by eliminating the labor component it’s all upside.