Agricultural Automation
Thoughts after reading the 2022 FAO State of Food and Agriculture Report
Automation for Agriculture and Food Production
Farming and food processing are both hard work. Back-breaking work. Just watching the videos that the United Farm Workers has recently released shows how much physically demanding this work is.
Farmers, farm workers and food workers get little choice.
We get some choice how our food is produced. If we are lucky, we can buy food from a local farm, know our farmer, and pay a decent amount for their manual labor.
I would love to read a report that discusses this hard work, recognizes that small farms grow something like 70% of our food, and suggests methods of making that work less arduous. Automation which works for small sustainable farmers.
I understand from watching vlogs by SheepishlyMe how automation of tractors, combine harvesters, seeders, fertilizers really helps. The tractors drive themselves. This works for cereal crops including soy grown in large fields. Fields that are 15, 20 acres or more.
There is similar technology for small farms growing produce except that it isn’t cost effective as each automation may have to be adapted for each crop and each farm. The nature of the land, especially if it is hilly or otherwise marginalized, means the adoption of automation is even more challenging. Small farmers lack the capital to finance such equipment.
Many farmers live without electricity, without decent infrastructure, which limits their ability to obtain, run, and repair machinery. Hand-held and animal-driven tools are easy to use and repair, are less environmentally destructive than motorized tractors, and may have many roles on a farm.
Perhaps automation and other technology could make farming easier, environmentally friendly, and support food sovereignty?
Unfortunately, the 2022 State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN doesn’t answer this question and fails to even mention food sovereignty. Nowhere in the report is there the impression that the report authors talked to farmers and asked them what they wanted. The Executive Summary read more like an advertisement for automation and technology companies.
The focus of this report was using adaptive technologies for intensive sustainable agriculture with a claim that technology like motorized equipment is essential for food production. In this case, it seems intensive sustainable agriculture is mostly a way to slightly tweak conventional agriculture to make it appear environmentally friendly.
The report recommends governments encourage automation by making the introduction “neutral”, a recognition that equipment costs money, favoring richer and larger farm owners. The report recommends governments update infrastructure to provide jobs for people put out of work by mechanization, to provide renewable energy to run motorized equipment and modern technology, and to provide financial support for small farmers so they can afford to adopt new motorized equipment.
I would love to read a report that freely and honestly discusses that challenges facing small farmers with recommendations on how technology may lessen the challenges of farming, while maintaining biodiversity, and being cost-effective.
Farming is fucking hard work.
I don’t see technology helping especially if it is market driven rather than farmer driven. We’ll end up with the same result we saw after the Green Revolution: small farmers forced off their land, going out of business, and over time, not that long in the future, more loss of soil and clean water.