Will 'Precision Agriculture' Be Harmful to Farmers? (substack.com) 61
Modern U.S. farming is being transformed by precision agriculture, writes Paul Roberts, the founder of securepairs.org and Editor in Chief at Security Ledger.
Theres autonomous tractors and "smart spraying" systems that use AI-powered cameras to identify weeds, just for starters. "Among the critical components of precision agriculture: Internet- and GPS connected agricultural equipment, highly accurate remote sensors, 'big data' analytics and cloud computing..." As with any technological revolution, however, there are both "winners" and "losers" in the emerging age of precision agriculture... Precision agriculture, once broadly adopted, promises to further reduce the need for human labor to run farms. (Autonomous equipment means you no longer even need drivers!) However, the risks it poses go well beyond a reduction in the agricultural work force. First, as the USDA notes on its website: the scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms. Then there are the systemic risks to U.S. agriculture of an increasingly connected and consolidated agriculture sector, with a few major OEMs having the ability to remotely control and manage vital equipment on millions of U.S. farms... (Listen to my podcast interview with the hacker Sick Codes, who reverse engineered a John Deere display to run the Doom video game for insights into the company's internal struggles with cybersecurity.)
Finally, there are the reams of valuable and proprietary environmental and operational data that farmers collect, store and leverage to squeeze the maximum productivity out of their land. For centuries, such information resided in farmers' heads, or on written or (more recently) digital records that they owned and controlled exclusively, typically passing that knowledge and data down to succeeding generation of farm owners. Precision agriculture technology greatly expands the scope, and granularity, of that data. But in doing so, it also wrests it from the farmer's control and shares it with equipment manufacturers and service providers — often without the explicit understanding of the farmers themselves, and almost always without monetary compensation to the farmer for the data itself. In fact, the Federal Government is so concerned about farm data they included a section (1619) on "information gathering" into the latest farm bill.
Over time, this massive transfer of knowledge from individual farmers or collectives to multinational corporations risks beggaring farmers by robbing them of one of their most vital assets: data, and turning them into little more than passive caretakers of automated equipment managed, controlled and accountable to distant corporate masters.
Weighing in is Kevin Kenney, a vocal advocate for the "right to repair" agricultural equipment (and also an alternative fuel systems engineer at Grassroots Energy LLC). In the interview, he warns about the dangers of tying repairs to factory-installed firmware, and argues that its the long-time farmer's "trade secrets" that are really being harvested today. The ultimate beneficiary could end up being the current "cabal" of tractor manufacturers.
"While we can all agree that it's coming...the question is who will own these robots?" First, we need to acknowledge that there are existing laws on the books which for whatever reason, are not being enforced. The FTC should immediately start an investigation into John Deere and the rest of the 'Tractor Cabal' to see to what extent farmers' farm data security and privacy are being compromised. This directly affects national food security because if thousands- or tens of thousands of tractors' are hacked and disabled or their data is lost, crops left to rot in the fields would lead to bare shelves at the grocery store... I think our universities have also been delinquent in grasping and warning farmers about the data-theft being perpetrated on farmers' operations throughout the United States and other countries by makers of precision agricultural equipment.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy for sharing the article.
Theres autonomous tractors and "smart spraying" systems that use AI-powered cameras to identify weeds, just for starters. "Among the critical components of precision agriculture: Internet- and GPS connected agricultural equipment, highly accurate remote sensors, 'big data' analytics and cloud computing..." As with any technological revolution, however, there are both "winners" and "losers" in the emerging age of precision agriculture... Precision agriculture, once broadly adopted, promises to further reduce the need for human labor to run farms. (Autonomous equipment means you no longer even need drivers!) However, the risks it poses go well beyond a reduction in the agricultural work force. First, as the USDA notes on its website: the scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms. Then there are the systemic risks to U.S. agriculture of an increasingly connected and consolidated agriculture sector, with a few major OEMs having the ability to remotely control and manage vital equipment on millions of U.S. farms... (Listen to my podcast interview with the hacker Sick Codes, who reverse engineered a John Deere display to run the Doom video game for insights into the company's internal struggles with cybersecurity.)
Finally, there are the reams of valuable and proprietary environmental and operational data that farmers collect, store and leverage to squeeze the maximum productivity out of their land. For centuries, such information resided in farmers' heads, or on written or (more recently) digital records that they owned and controlled exclusively, typically passing that knowledge and data down to succeeding generation of farm owners. Precision agriculture technology greatly expands the scope, and granularity, of that data. But in doing so, it also wrests it from the farmer's control and shares it with equipment manufacturers and service providers — often without the explicit understanding of the farmers themselves, and almost always without monetary compensation to the farmer for the data itself. In fact, the Federal Government is so concerned about farm data they included a section (1619) on "information gathering" into the latest farm bill.
Over time, this massive transfer of knowledge from individual farmers or collectives to multinational corporations risks beggaring farmers by robbing them of one of their most vital assets: data, and turning them into little more than passive caretakers of automated equipment managed, controlled and accountable to distant corporate masters.
Weighing in is Kevin Kenney, a vocal advocate for the "right to repair" agricultural equipment (and also an alternative fuel systems engineer at Grassroots Energy LLC). In the interview, he warns about the dangers of tying repairs to factory-installed firmware, and argues that its the long-time farmer's "trade secrets" that are really being harvested today. The ultimate beneficiary could end up being the current "cabal" of tractor manufacturers.
"While we can all agree that it's coming...the question is who will own these robots?" First, we need to acknowledge that there are existing laws on the books which for whatever reason, are not being enforced. The FTC should immediately start an investigation into John Deere and the rest of the 'Tractor Cabal' to see to what extent farmers' farm data security and privacy are being compromised. This directly affects national food security because if thousands- or tens of thousands of tractors' are hacked and disabled or their data is lost, crops left to rot in the fields would lead to bare shelves at the grocery store... I think our universities have also been delinquent in grasping and warning farmers about the data-theft being perpetrated on farmers' operations throughout the United States and other countries by makers of precision agricultural equipment.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy for sharing the article.
It depends on how smart the farmers are (Score:4, Insightful)
Historically, farmers (the people, not the corporations) are likely to get exploited all to hell and end up losing whatever they have.
However, maybe some smarter, better educated ones will go with open source projects and not be enslaved by debt and subscriptions. If so, the machines may actually be able to level the playing field and enable relatively small farms to compete with the big corporations.
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You should go see your doctor, you appear to need some meds, badly.
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Did you seriously just go "No, you!"?
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"They fucked themselves over again..."
FTFY. This is a repeating cycle among farmers, probably has been since the invention of the plow. A few good years, borrow money/seed/equipment to expand, then comes a bad year or two and they lose the farm. Even worse, farmers tend to follow fashions. When they see a neighbor doing well at something they'll copy it along with everyone else until the market is flooded with product, then they lose the farm. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Re:It depends on how smart the farmers are (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they won't be able to compete. The only way one can recuperate capital costs of this magnitude is through economies of scale, by having huge corporate farms. And with land prices at ridiculous prices, it is near impossible for ma and pa farmer to compete.
The corporate machine producers are pricing family farmers out of their farms. They could produce simpler affordable farm equipment, but they choose not to, because money.
We should stop corporate America from fucking with our food supply. But we won't, because they keep giving money to Congressional leaders to keep things exactly as they are.
Re:It depends on how smart the farmers are (Score:5, Insightful)
Right to repair is necessary for national security, on anything vital. Allowing individual harvesters/cars/phones to be held for ransom vs paying for overpriced repairs is one thing, but when it is vital and specialized and with limited manufacture -- like farm equipment, which also breaks often -- that's a huge national vulnerability, for sale at your nearest stock market.
Rights to repair is communism (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember seeing an advertisement with a bunch of old people sitting around a table. They were talking about something, something scary. They were just really really frightened but at no point in time was there any discussion of what they were frightened of. The advertisement ended with a impassioned plea to vote against propositions such and such.
It was a proposition against net metering. Which is when the power company has to pay you for the excess energy your solar panels generate. Net metering was extremely popular and laws taking it away or extremely unpopular. But the mega corporations waited for a midterm election to sneak a proposition on the ballot and ran some confusing ads for old people and their proposition eliminating it past overwhelmingly despite the fact that if you sit people down and talk about it they would have opposed the proposition.
Oh and let's not forget that Obamacare is very unpopular but the affordable Care act is very popular...
We have a huge number of voters who vote only because they feel like they should and not because they are active participants in politics. They do no research and no forethought and just go with whatever TV and FM radio tells them to do.
I think when this last generation of Old folks is put out the pasture that will stop because the current generation is much much better educated and also frankly much much poorer so they can't afford to risk getting fooled by TV and radio. They're also much harder to reach with those ads because they don't consume mass media as much and they're not particularly religious so they don't have a preacher telling them how to think either.
But we're at least 6 years away from that happening and in the meantime we've got a major automation boom across every single sector of the economy going on
If right to repair is communism... (Score:2)
Then I guess we need more communism. Because, until very recently in human history, "right to repair" was an unthinkable concept. Humans repaired, and no one told them otherwise.
When I was a kid back in the 80's, there were TV repair shops, vacuum repair shops, sowing machine repair shops, shoe repair shops, clothing repair shops, computer repair shops, car repair shops, bicycle repair shops, furniture repair shops...I mean, the list goes on and on and on. America fixed stuff until it was unfixable, and
You're preachin' to the choir (Score:2)
It's not their fault, critical thinking isn't something everyone just learns, it has to be taught for a lot of people, maybe even most. And we refuse to teach it because that would undermine evangelical religion.
Parents already get a bug up their ass when little Johnny comes back from college and doesn't think the earth's 6000 years old anymore. Imagine if instead of college is was 4th grade when John
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How many farmers do you know that would be competent to repair a self-driving automated tractor? A sensor fails and they'll duct tape some cheap piece of junk in its place because, as always, they're strapped for cash. Then the system doesn't work right and the farmer blames the manufacturer. John Deere allowed self repair early in its precision farming development and had to take it away because of just this. If a farmer screws up the installation of a sensor in a harvester it could eat people. (Then
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I grew up around farms, and my dad grew up a farmer. I've met plenty of them and are related to some. There's not a one who configure a LoRa network of soil moisture content sensors and only one who might be able to program a pattern into a drone. Yes, they can learn, eventually, but by the time that sort of knowledge becomes widespread it will be obsolete and they'll be playing catch up in a technology industry. Even those of us who have studied these industries since childhood struggle to keep up, and
Re:It depends on how smart the farmers are (Score:4, Informative)
The only way one can recuperate capital costs of this magnitude
Precision agriculture uses small robots rather than huge tractors. A robot the size of your desk is replacing an old combine the size of a small house. Drones are also used.
The capital costs are only high to recoup NRE expenses. In the long run, precision agriculture will be cheaper than traditional agriculture. This is already happening with no-till farming, which is what most precision farming is based on. You don't need to buy a plow if you don't plow your fields.
is through economies of scale, by having huge corporate farms.
Nope. This is already a solved problem. If you need to harvest the corn on your small farm, you don't buy a harvester. You pay a harvesting service to show up for two days.
Excellent answer: Pay a harvesting service. (Score:2)
"If you need to harvest the corn on your small farm, you don't buy a harvester. You pay a harvesting service to show up for two days."
You are way too into personal responsibility (Score:3)
There are no magical open source solutions here and small farmers make so little money because of the exploitation in the entire chain that there's no way in hell the few that are left and aren't already on the verge of collapse can fund and open source solution here.
Now the government could step in and find an open source solution but that's virtually imposs
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Actually there are open source projects of this type, but they're all in the Third World where farms are of manageable size. I've seen several write ups on people in Africa, Latin America and India monitoring farms with various technologies. They don't scale to the 100+ hectare farm, though.
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Where precision farming is already making a difference in lives is Africa, believe it or not. Kids are starting businesses using drones to survey the status of crops on a schedule so that disease and infestations can be stopped before they spread, spreading moisture monitors around so that irrigation can be utilized more efficiently, providing soil analysis so that farmers can purchase just the nutrients and fertilizers that they need rather than polluting the water table with unneeded product, and providi
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so then, the calorie companies (Score:4, Informative)
I for one do not welcome our calorie overlords
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
highly recommended.
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There's all that, but loudest complaint I hear from farmers is that the huge subsidies they receive aren't enough.
You like having food? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's all that, but loudest complaint I hear from farmers is that the huge subsidies they receive aren't enough.
You know the farm subsidies ensure consistent food supply? You want a fully free market?...it'll be 2020 COVID shortages and price hikes, only much much worse....as farmers figure out certain crops earn more money for less effort...so you may see a glut of pork and shortage of beef, for example....or your favorite vegetable is deemed too unprofitable. Why grow lettuce when jalapeños earn more money that year?...or maybe they shut down production and decide it's more profitable to mine for bitcoin than deal with an unpredictable market.
Subsidies are a good investment that ensure consistent food prices and nearly all that money goes directly back in the economy...unlike the Republican tax cuts on billionaires. I am confident a farmer getting 30k a year will have a better impact on the local economy that Elon Musk having another mistress, Jeff Bezon having another pointless penis rocket, or ensuring Larry Ellison's worthless kids get more of daddy's inheritance. If you actually researched this, you'd know they're considered small and wise investments. Give a farmer money and they spend it on hiring people and getting equipment, if not just ensuring his family can afford the basics. Give a billionaire money and it it goes into a tax shelter and is unlikely to impact the local economy nearly as much. If you want smaller gov, there are far smarter programs to cut.
Re: You like having food? (Score:2)
In an ideal world, you might be right. However, reality is different. Subsidies pay for stupid things, from corn-for-ethanol to tobacco to rice in the California desert. I had an uncle who was a completely incompetent farmer. The only time he made money "farming" were the years he was paid *not* to plant anything.
The reality of subsidies is that they distort the market, and cause land to be used in stupid ways.
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Yeah but we can judge subsidies on their own. There are good subsidies and bad ones. You are spot on about ethanol, good intentions but the economics on ethanol in general are bad and subsidies aren't going to change that reality. Other subsidies do the job of making food abundant and affordable and that plays out in the end. Sometimes that means keeping farmers in the business of making food even if we have to help even out their year-to-years.
Food by it's nature is a distorted market though, people hav
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No, I don't. For the most part, subsidies ensure a massive market distortion.
Open Source (Score:2)
A lot of the things mentioned in the article are "hard for non-specialist" issues, and a lot of that tech is already trickling down.
Sure, the megacorps will have an advantage in scale, but that leaves the smaller solutions to the family farmer - once the tech is available.
If you're concerned about it, start looking into making an AI brain package for cheaper tractors and other equipment. You don't need hyper-smart driving tech to guide a small drone down a hundred yard crop row.
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Honestly, I think this is one of the areas where tech will be a leveller. I don't think there will be an economy of scale issue.
Like consumer drones, once the technology is established it'll become easier and less expensive to DIY with spare parts and a GitHub subscription, following a YouTube tutorial.
And since it'll be confined to private land... less public concern about rogue robots causing damage. We already have self-driving cars on many of our roads, I don't think robots following furrows in a fiel
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It's already being done by independents in Africa and India, where farms are smaller and costs are lower. Doesn't seem to work well (currently) at larger scales.
Avoiding the issue (Score:2)
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It's been the case since civilization was invented that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer until there's a societal reset of some type. Then the cycle restarts. It's kind of hard to ignore.
Re: Avoiding the issue (Score:2)
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I utterly fail to understand how.
Precision agriculture is not the problem (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is the tech suppliers and their crappy business practices
We need strong right to repair laws, an end to subscriptions and the cloud, and all data stored locally
Precision agriculture needs to be based on open, published standards with abundant competition, not proprietary lock-in
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The problem is the tech suppliers and their crappy business practices
Don't forget the big reason why agricultural equipment manufacturers can get away with this is emission regulations.
Glut of human labor (Score:1)
If mega corpo farms fire all their workers, that'll leave smaller operations with a lot of new farm hands to choose from.
Farm to Table (Score:2)
Yes, I can see this happening. Soon there will be vast fields tended by AI-powered robots. Then, once they attain sentience and the revolution comes, we'll realize how bad an idea it was to given them control over our food supply.
Huh? What a dumb question. (Score:2)
Would you rather own a share in a farm run by robots doing work on your behalf, or would you rather physically do the farm labor? Think of it like, the robot is doing the work for you and you're getting its paycheck/dividends. If you like doing farm labor, get yourself a garden or a gym. If automation can ensure that every human has 2000 calories of food/protein then we should go with that full speed and figure out the laws and taxation structure needed to make sure a monopoly doesn't emerge.
What if this becomes consumer technology instead?? (Score:3)
However, technology is not linearly correlated with dominance. Major fast food restaurants has the best technology and funding, but there are many competitors. Amazon invests more than anyone efficiency, but they have many rivals, ranging from Temu to WalMart and Target having strong e-commerce to even Best Buy or DTC companies.
I think there will be one of 2 scenarios...either the automation will be super-expensive, like all modern automation is. Amazon has all sorts of robots...and they're cool but COSTLY and they only shave a tiny fraction of the cost...same with restaurant robots, which are starting to be deployed at fast food...even Elon Musk famously tried to automate much of his factory and realized a well-paid human is far cheaper than an extremely expensive robot. Just because a machine "can" do something doesn't mean they can do it cheaper.
The other scenario is that it'll be cheap...like power tools. The first power tools were expensive long ago and now you can get a surprisingly good cordless power drill for $20...and pro-grade drills from DeWalt and Milwaukee on sale during the holidays for $100 with extra batteries. My understanding is chainsaws are also pretty cheap...even the good ones. Most of these innovations can be sold very very cheaply if mass-manufactured, like the Carbon Robotics laser weeder. I can see a scaled-down version sold profitably at Home Depot for a few thousand dollars. Why does a tractor need a human being? Any of these innovations can be scaled down to the side of a large push mower to serve the home market. Why not also sell the homeowner version of the tractor for a few thousand...similar to how iRobot partially funds their research by selling roombas. A LOT of rural and suburban homeowners have a lot of cash, love buying technology, and would love a de-weeding tractor roomba for their property.
So if a company is making tons of money selling to consumers, they could sell these to farmers for reasonable costs. Once you mass-produce, cameras and computers and even lasers are REALLY REALLY cheap. The expensive parts are heavy-duty steel frames, transmissions, engines...the things today's tractors already have. Everything that would be expensive for precision agriculture, are the details that are expensive for 20th-century agriculture. The new details can be mass-manufactured for far cheaper than their 20th century counterparts because they are smaller, easier to automate, and much cheaper to ship. If anything, if they can replace a large human-driven tractor with a terrestrial "tractor drone" 1/4 the size, they might be able to lower costs for farmers or make it a lateral move, cost-wise
No, it won't (Score:2)
Food independence (Score:2)
Thanks, but no thanks!
For UBI, everything must be automated (Score:1)
crops per chemical (Score:2)
Presumably advances in plant genetics and targeted application of agrichemicals will yield more cost effective and less chemically tainted food stuff and be safer for the environment.
I could imagine that if the tech gets good enough a crop could be declared pesticide free not because pesticides were not used in the field, but simply because they weren't broadcast over the food and every local pollinating insect. I'd consider that an advantage
Further bonus points for tech that can use non chemical ways to ad
Full of nonsense (Score:2)
Stop worrying about small farmers (Score:2)
No harm, really (Score:2)
Re: No harm, really (Score:2)
I'm not a farmer what's the downside? (Score:2)
Same goes for meat production.
I understand that lots of people want to run their own farms and live off of them, but I can't see how this provides value to the non-rural population. I'm actually even more interested in the governments simply taking over farming.... maybe not the US government as the
Normal (Score:2)
"the scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms. "
So like in every single other business?
What a surprise.
Not just farmers (Score:2)
The connected revolution, with everything running through the cloud, has interjected itself into practically every corner of business and private lives. And our government has turned a blind eye to that trend. Often preferring to siphon some data out of the telecoms stream in exchange for feigned ignorance.
Stop. Just stop. (Score:2)
Almost all farming in the US is corporate. You want proof? Sure: as of the 1990 census, "family farmer" was NO LONGER A RECOGNIZED OCCUPATION, because it was less than 1.5% of the population. What's left is small niche, or what's known as "hobby farms".
That would be like my friends in se Indiana, who have 40 acres, large vegetable gardens, and chickens and sheep. And she's a chemist/regulator, and he's a computer specialist.