The 2018 Legislature approved spending $55 million to build the precision agriculture program at SDSU. Teaching undergraduates to use science and technology to grow more food more efficiently is a fine investment of our higher education resources (and a good way to stop Senator Cronin from applying dicamba when he shouldn’t).
But could precision agriculture also nail shut the coffin of South Dakota’s small towns?
I know my neighbor Heidi Marttila-Losure will tell me there’s much more to rural life than industrial-scale farming and the scenario of deathly dwindle I’m about to propose. But consider the possibility that precision agriculture, with all of its drones and smart machines, could make possible the logical conclusion of over two centuries of the mechanization of agriculture: obviating the need for farmers to live in the country.
Consider this description of precision agriculture research happening up I-29 at North Dakota State University:
If machines are going to go out and identify weeds and then send out drones or sprayers to control them, the cameras researchers first must “teach” the machines how to tell the weeds from crops and weeds from weeds.
And if cattle farmers and ranchers are going to use drones to count cattle and check them for diseases, they’ll need some “machine learning” to sort out what behavior is meaningless and what might indicate disease stress.
These are among the goals of new precision agriculture studies underway at North Dakota State University, which has just launched a new precision agriculture degree program with major and minor degrees precision agriculture [Mikkel Pates, “Brave New World of Drones, Ag Data,” AgWeek, 2019.06.03].
Science and technology are great. But imagine: if farmers can raise an entire crop or dairy herd remotely, how many of the next generation will still choose to live in the country, and how many will choose to operate their farms from their multi-screen consoles in their urban flats, just blocks from their favorite jazz club?
A lot of people choose to live in the country, (or smaller towns), if they can afford to.
I’ve heard that houses in small towns in the Fargo area are selling better lately because some just want to get out of the city, but more often they want to get away from Fargo’s punishing property tax. It takes all kinds.
I doubt if remote farming will ever become a reality. Say a robot gets
to close to a slough and gets stuck in the mud. Will another robot come and pull
it out? In most cases, when automatic equipment breaks down,, aah, malfunctions,
an actual human is required to do the repairs, or the reboot, or whatever
term is appropriate.
I agree Edwin, about people living in more rural areas for economic and social/cultural reasons. The opposite is also true. Cities are growing faster than suburbs.
I also agree that there are some things it will take a very long time for machines to learn. My guess is that bots will be handling all the crop duties much sooner than livestock. Those of us who’ve grown up with livestock don’t have to think a lot about the various behaviors of cattle, sheep, hogs, chickens, alpacas, horses, etc. It feels like it comes naturally. But imagine a lifelong urban dweller who’s never seen a live animal beyond cats, dogs and birds.
A couple years I was checking out the beef cattle barn at the Minnesota State Fair. There was a young woman in a summer skirt outfit and strappy sandals with heels–in the aisle between beef cattle. She wanted a friend to take a photo of her so she could prove she had actually been there. She was complaining about the smell, messiness and “These don’t even look like cows! Where’s the black and white ones?” (Holsteins, as seen in commercials and on milk cartons.)
Now, take her out on the farm and teach her how to manage your livestock so you can move to town and leave it all up to her. 😆😆😆
South Dakota is a little slow on this. Many producers are using the technology already.
My daughter has been involved in various start ups involved in precision ag and urban ag in China. Four years (in 2015) she was quoted on this issue in IDG Connect, an on-line publication that reports on IT issues. I provide an excerpt here:
The Chinese drone maker has begun spreading its wings beyond drone hobbyists into various industries. In May, it signed a new deal with Batian, a Chinese fertiliser production giant.
The deal received little or no coverage in the English-speaking tech press but the agreement will see [Chinese] the two companies establish an “agricultural UAV application service system” covering a wide field of farming functions.
According to Even Rogers Pay, former chief product officer at Smart Agriculture Analytics and now based in China, the deal will lead to the development of an “agricultural UAV management system for agrochemicals, fertilisers, and seed products designed for aerial application, as well as a platform to collect and analyse climate, soil, pest, and natural disaster data.”
“The agreement also covers trainings and finance, including a potential leasing system,” she writes.
Agriculture appears to be factoring into DJI’s long term strategy. The Chinese company recently secured a $75 million investment from Accel Partners, which will go towards developing a new software platform as well as collaboration opportunities for outside developers.
DJI will invite developers to create new software for specific uses with its drones, including applications in mining, oil and gas excavation and of course, agriculture.
This brings to mind Bob Gibson singing a Shel Silverstein tune – I’m the man who turns the damn thing off and on.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMluwaoS2ms
Mr. Pay, it looks like that technology will go to Russia as they will replace the United States in China’s food needs. Well played trump, well played. As there is an oil glut, Russia will need other means to raise capital and lookey lookey, trump comes through again. trump is the farmer’s bestest friend…in Russia.
“Russia’s leading meat producer has said it is ready to fill the supply gap left by the US as the world’s most populous market struggles with the double blow of a devastating swine fever epidemic and a protracted trade war.
Cherkizovo Group, the largest meat producer in Russia, began shipping poultry products to China last month, and is now looking forward to selling pork and soybeans there, according to CEO Sergey Mikhailov, in an interview with the South China Morning Post on Thursday.”
It would be decent if precision allowed, fostered, SD farmers to grow food instead of the feed they now grow.
There’s more to ranching than just checking on the animals for disease or to be sure they have feed and water. What will a drone do when cattle (or horses, bison, llamas, etc.) go through a fence into the neighbor’s pasture, crops, yard, or onto the road? Will a drone be able to repair the fence immediately once the animal is back where it belongs? Will a drone be able to repair a water pipe or broken pump?
In my neighborhood the ranchers still live here in the country, but many of them work full time in town and so neglect their work by necessity during office hours and commuting time. When something goes wrong it is up to the few full-time ranchers to clean up the mess because they cannot stand by and ignore loose or injured animals.
If more people live far from the ground where they ranch or farm, relying on drones to do their work, many small problems will become disasters before there is someone on site to fix things.
CAFO’s show how humane dairy works. Thanks Coca-Cola for being such an insensitive organization. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/6/7/1863319/-One-of-the-largest-diary-farms-exposed-for-animal-abuses-after-horrific-undercover-video-goes-viral?utm_campaign=trending
This is what governor Gnoem wants more of. republicans are serial abusers, so this fits right into their wheelhouse.
Fairburn, that’s the kind of thing I had in mind when I said it would take a long time, if ever, for drones to learn the nuances of managing livestock.
Edwin Arndt – my experience with the small town seekers around SF (not the actually booming – soon-to-be-real cities suburbs of Brandon/Tea/Harrisburg – but a wee bit further out) is they SOON discover that actually being able to benefit from the amenities of the bigger city (jobs, clothes, food/entertainment and so on) while residing away from the “crowds” is more expensive in terms of both money and time to living closer. I live in such a slightly more remote town, and housing turnover(sales) is around 33% every 5 years. People move in – give “rural” living a try for 4-5 years and get back to the city.
Edwin, a few years ago, I might have expressed the same confidence about the irreplaceability of foreign language teachers. Google Translate couldn’t ever teach kids how to really communicate with people from other lands, I would have said.
Now I can talk into my computer while presenting a slideshow and have Microsoft produce nearly instant captions in multiple languages to multiple listeners. I can hold my phone up to a poster in Russian and get a workable translation in English (or French, or Spanish…).
We will still need people who can study and communicate in multiple languages without technological mediation. And speaking Russian is a lot of fun. But I’m not going to make any firm statement that technology will never make my preferred job obsolete. I see no evidence that achines can’t be taught to do all the things you, Edwin, mentioned as supposedly forever strictly the purview of human neighbors.
Drones repairing fence and water pipes? I can Google up examples of robotic sewer repair systems, robotic pipe leak detectors, remote deep-sea pipeline repair. Remote/autonomous fence repair may be trickier, but I can imagine it being somewhat like the Keystone tarsands oil pipeline: TransCanada doesn’t have to keep repair people stationed in every town along the pipeline; they have a handful of people stationed at a few points along the route, and when they spring a leak, they simply send a team to the site to fix it. Remote farms would do something similar: instead of having a farmer and a hired hand on site at every farm, there will be a handful of service teams based in the Aberdeens and Mitchells and Jamestowns and Norfolks who serve farms in a hundred-mile radius.
My speculation here is not that a farmer could do every single farm task with autonomous drones and remote-control robots (although I can envision a machine that can patrol the fence line, identify broken and rewire broken sections, and call in drones that would drive cattle back to the automatic gate). My contention is that if precision agriculture and robotics can automate or remote-ify the routine tasks of farming (plating, weeding, spraying, harvesting, milking, checking, herding), we significantly reduce or eliminate the need for people to live on farms in rural areas 24/7. Reducing/eliminating that need could go different ways: maybe lots more farmers up and move to town, or maybe farmers stay in the country and get to enjoy country living more and go on more vacations.
But for 200 years, our entire species as mostly been trading isolated rural life for busier, crowded urban life that offers more diverse economic, cultural, and social opportunities. We send our kids to the big towns for college. We drive/fly to the big towns for sports and concerts. We rush to the big towns when we need heart operations and cancer treatment.
Precision agriculture offers the opportunity for more people to raise food while living in urban areas. It reduces the need for farmers to live in small towns. By itself, precision agriculture seems to release more air from the rural population balloon.
Now Fairburn does raise a point with which I agree: when people live far from the ground they tend, they don’t do as good a job as farmers/ranchers who live on site. That’s totally my critique of corporate farming and CAFOs: when the owners and decision-makers live a county or a state away, they aren’t as sensitive to the ecological damage their operations do as folks who live and work on the land. I agree that we would get the best environmental and social outcomes if farming took place on the Wendell Berry/Kirkpatrick Sale scale, with an independent owner/family on every quarter, raising real food for themselves and their neighbors.
But I’m not going to mandate that model of farming, and obviously, the majority of farmers aren’t choosing that model. Neither is SDSU or the Legislature, which is throwing big money into technological farming that appears poised to further reduce the population base for small rural communities, a sad point which wishful thinking about idyllic rural living doesn’t appear to rebut.
” … a machine that can patrol the fence line, identify broken and rewire broken sections”
Wire? What’s wire, old timer? Fences are lasers.
Porter, I’ve spent the last several days fixing fence, (to the extent that an old man
can). Do tell me more about laser fence. I’ve yet to see a laser fence. It sounds
wonderful. Does laser fence go over hills and around sloughs?
Cory, I don’t think you have a grasp of the many variables that can come up
in field operations. When a rock gets caught in the closing wheels of the
planter will a robot remove it? When the planter is out of seed will a robot
fill the planter with seed? When the field is finished will the autonomous
planter find the next field? When the tractor needs to be serviced, (fuel, oil),
will a robot do that? This is just the simple stuff. I just do not foresee
that a human presence will not be required.
Hi, Edwin … Fixing fence was always so darn tedious but we had to do it. I remember a neighbor got injured and bedridden and all the neighbors took a day and fenced for him.
Anyway, you won’t see laser fence because I just thought of it. Yes, using satellite to bounce and direct it, laser fences will go over hills and around or through obstacles.
*I was blessed with skills in research and innovation. Remember… you heard it here first. Good luck to you and your crop. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Porter, I’m waiting with unbounded and indescribable anticipation.
Porter, do you think it well be in my lifetime?
Oh, yeah, and I was cursed with a certain amount of scepticism.
Without a doubt, Edwin. Who thought satellites could steer a tractor?
What have you got left? Fifty more? :)
Edwin, I enjoy a little well tended sarcasm such as yours.
Jim Hagedorn is a first term GOP Congressman from southwest Minnesota and a Wilted Weenie lover. He “supports Trump’s hawkish trade moves against China, recounting how he told the president personally that nearly all the farmers he talks to in the district tell him Trump is doing the right thing even if it means short-term pain for them personally.”
That may not be true, given the penchant for lying that seems to infect wingnuts. I’m sure some of those farmers still do support the Idiot, having that characteristic in common.
This comes from a paywalled article in the Strib about this state’s 2 new GOP reps. One is a moderate in a moderate, northern district. The other, Hagedorn, is a jacka$$.
http://strib.mn/2ZfWapG
Porter—lasers! Indeed, what was I thinking? Can we use invisible fences with livestock the way we do with dogs? Or just some flying robot scarecrows that shoo the cattle back to the right side of the pasture?
Edwin, do you believe the variables involved in farming are greater in number and/or degree of difficulty than the variables involved in driving in city traffic?
The Norwegian company No Fence offers fencing collars for cattle that operate on GPS. The rancher doesn’t install any fence, just a collar on each critter. The rancher punches in the GPS coordinates for the proper pasture, and then if the collar leaves that zone, zap!.
Collars on cows. Nice 👍🏻
My laser fence would be like a light saber. Slightly visible. Adjustable shock intensity and adjustable vertically and horizontally like a wall. It could keep out deer, wapiti, bears, skunks, mosquitoes and for Governors and Presidents, terrorists. (I just checked. Mexico won’t pay for it)
Cory, comparing ag field operation to city traffic is not valid.
Navigating the tractor and implement up and down the field
is relatively easy. Auto steer works pretty well when it works.
I’ve had the experience of riding the tractor with auto steer
engaged and all of a sudden it quits. Then it has to be reset.
That takes a person as of now. It’s the other stuff I mentioned,
minor repairs, seed, servicing the machine, greasing the planter,
that require human presence. Human presence would be
needed, I think, at a minimum of every three hours,
It seems to me it would be more practical to just have a person
on site.
As to the fence deal, I’m not aware that this system has
been marketed anywhere nearby. It would be great if it worked
and the cost was affordable. Read the comments on the link
you provided for a little realism.
Moar Drumpf lies…And then Bloomberg reported this:
President Donald Trump boasted of “large” agricultural sales to Mexico as part of a deal reached Friday on border security and illegal immigration that averted the threat of U.S. tariffs, but the deal as released had none, and three Mexico officials say they’re not aware of any side deal.
Drumpf, as you are all aware, is on Twitter calling everyone liars and what not.
This is good. My senator, Amy Klobuchar, was campaigning for president in Iowa today. She said Wilted Weenie is treating farmers “like poker chips at one of his failed casinos.”
BOOM!
But Edwin, I think you’re missing the economic argument here. Human presence every three hours could be maintained more efficiently with hired hands working for a corporate owner on ten or more adjoining farms than by maintaining a resident owner on every farm who makes two or three repairs a day while the robots do all the work for the other 23 hours a day.
Self-driving tractors can plant and harvest overnight, right? Self-driving trucks can bring corn and beans to the elevator overnight, right?