I was reading that and thinking family sized farm scale. If the machines are cheaper farms can be smaller and still justify buying a machine. Asian markets have quite a few small machines for managing rice crops.
That’s a failure of imagination. Hordes of people used to do all the work, and Industrial Age engineering (thinking) replaced them with a combination of large, specialized devices and large, specialized farm layouts. It was more efficient for the technology of the time.
But we don’t build computing like that any more. Instead of large centralized single devices we use a large amount of protean hardware with various adapts (software).
Hordes of small devices can flood through the fields, using sensors to decide at any point what to do, and can use different effectors for different tasks at different times of the year, like the humans used to do.
I didn’t mean that — I agree that would be absurd!
I mean an autonomous device that picks a row, then does the same on the next row on the way back, then maybe unloads into a hopper and continues with the next couple of rows. And you don’t one, you have 50 or a couple of hundred of them rather than one huge combine harvester.
And if you have 50 of these platforms designed to go up and down the rows they could have been doing the planting at the beginning of the season (or desuckering your vines in spring or whatever) using a different tool, so your capex isn’t tied up in a few huge single-application devices, but amortized over a whole season. And when you have a fleet, if one fails and needs maintenance it’s no more of a big deal than when one server in a datacenter fails.
Bigger farms overall, which is anyway the trend so they utilize economies of scale. Or machine rentals if there is plenty of need from smaller farmers.
Unfortunately machine rental math does not work out for most of the specialised farming equipment in areas with changing seasons — when combine harvesters are needed (at the harvest time), they are needed for everyone within the same time window.
You might run into time of use contention unless you have a ver diversified crop neighborhood or adaptable robot. Don’t harvests usually happens at the same time for all the same species of crop in an area?
