this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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If that was the case, why isn't every industrial farm doing it?
In part because traditional farms scale better than aeroponics or hydroponics. In part because farms don't pay for the environmental damage they cause. Because of these two points, there is little incentive to industrialize aeroponics or hydroponics.
What is true right now is that traditional farms use more water, fertilizer, and space, cause more environmental damage, but require less labor. And the labor problem can be mitigated with robotics, if we're willing to invest in that.
The Venn diagram of farmers and early adopters is harry potter’s glasses
Have you seen all the crazy stuff get up to? Geospatial analysis of fields, drones for spot fertilizing, the acres covering water systems, turning waste crops into ethanol, etc
Farmers are quick to jump on an opportunity to refine their current processes in ways that reduce their inputs and increase their yields, especially when it only costs them a few grand in capital investment (drones for surveying and spot treatment) or is hilariously over-subsidized by the government (bioethanol). Wholesale change from the literal ground up, not so much, and perhaps understandably so -- farmers have massive, often generational investment in infrastructure and equipment for farming in specific ways and with specific crops, operate on narrow margins, and don't have much available liquidity to change things up on a whim. For that reason, major innovations in agriculture don't usually come from farmers; instead they usually come from university research.
There is definitely a back and forth between academics and industry in the agriculture field! The technological adoption spectrum was actually defined when looking at farmers.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The technology adoption lifecycle is a sociological model that describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups. The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or "bell curve". The model indicates that the first group of people to use a new product is called "innovators", followed by "early adopters". Next come the early majority and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called "Laggards" or "phobics." For example, a phobic may only use a cloud service when it is the only remaining method of performing a required task, but the phobic may not have an in-depth technical knowledge of how to use the service. The demographic and psychological (or "psychographic") profiles of each adoption group were originally specified by agricultural researchers in 1956: innovators – had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented early adopters – younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders, less prosperous early majority – more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbors late majority – older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active laggards – very conservative, had small farms and capital, oldest and least educatedThe model has subsequently been adapted for many areas of technology adoption in the late 20th century, for example in the spread of policy innovations among U.S. states.^article^ ^|^ ^about^
Poor lad thinks farming IRL is like his Stardew Valley save
Which is why “rurality” is a synonym for modernity, and why “rural electricity/telephone/internet access” reminds you of a high tech data center. Ok.
The farmers where I live were 100% the first to get fiber to the home, by nearly half a decade.
Cool anecdote.
Anecdotes are what data is built on.
data is not the plural of anecdote