First you say 'thanks to all the farmers', then you promote FAKE food???? Sounds anti-farmer to me. Then you want them to farm around solar panels....... You need to spend some TIME Working on a Farm.
Please do your diligence on how they actually make the cultured meat. I have and it's definitely not for me and the environmental benefits are not proven.
@@kerryb2689 my family was farming I think very highly of farmers! There is a lot of money to be made in farming! The issue today is that there are bad people who are corrupting the industry and destroying crops and the animals so we all have to pay more for our food! Bill Gates is not buying the land to farm he is buying it to starve us! As well he wants us to eat fake food so they can put chemicals in our bodies why you ask just use your brain and think about it!!
Any farmer will tell you that staying in business is really hard. The joke is: A farmer won the lottery and someone asked him what he was going to do with all that money. The farmer said," Well, I guess I'll just keep farming until it's all gone."
If you think a farmer isn't gambling, figure out how much they make vs invested capital, and go look at their books. Are some rich? Yes, but there are many that scrape by and barely make it or have to sell it all and do something else. It is a business like every other. There are winners and there are loosers, and the odds of loosing are higher than winning especially if you stay with 'it always worked for grandpa'.
@@servant74One of the saddest things is that farms are incredibly capital intensive, so when a farmer passes away sometimes their assets show that they might have a multi-million dollar net worth, but it's all tied up in tractors and barns. It certainly not liquid. So a lot of times the death tax can be the end of a family farm unfortunately.
@lestermarshall6501 that is not joke that is the truth. Only Corporate Farms make a profit because they get more advantages in Income Tax and other such things that a Family Farmer is denied.
@@philipvecchio3292yeah a certain political person was trying to get rid of the death tax but they are trying get rid of him. Tells you what they really are trying to do to people.
The reduction of herbicides is probably one of the most important agricultural discoveries of the last hundred years. As for AI being adapted for weeding, it will mark a revolution in food cost through the reduction of labour, the speed of operation and the time taken to market. All good news as far as I can see. Great video, thanks. 😊
RICKY, for agrovoltaics, you didn’t include that the panels can concentrate rain and dew to the CROP instead of all over the place. Alternatively, rainwater could be captured with gutters, stored and then precisely distributed to the crop as needed via pipes MOUNTED to the posts that support the panels.
Used solar panels are really cheap. Most farms have enough space that panels performing at 90% of capacity won't be a problem. Simply the shade of the panel is helping the farm. The cheaper they can get the panels, the more crops they can shade. I see farm solar as the go-to place to put "second life" solar panels. The supply of which will only increase over time, as new installations go to higher efficiency panels.
recently saw a video about a company growing veggies in water pumped out of fishtanks. So basically the food is eating the fish poo and filtering the water that goes back to the fish. I think there is a lot of potential in that because there will always be companies breeding freshwater fish on a large scale.
@@dianapennepacker6854 an investor's first thought is that aquaponics is a 1960s fad that's now only used for illegal drugs so they're not interested which means that if you _do_ get up & running, when something expensive breaks your business has collapsed before you find funding for the replacement part. Economics & its fads, not science or agriculture, is what's killed aquaponics.
It takes more than one type of food source to create a balanced circle of life. We have tried and failed several times with bio domes but I think we are getting closer. I think last time, not enough focus was made with mycological input.
@@gary.richardson its impossible to have a plant only depending on ammonia in fish waste. It needs other chemicals that are in the hydroponic mix. It is a balanced cycle like a pond just the habitat of plants is separate from the fish, unlike a pond. The problem arises when v add methods to curb pathogens. There are probiotics that gets wasted . Including mycobacterium. Like say UV which kills all biotics.
Do you think there might be issues with accidentally triggering wildfires with this technique or is there too much water around crops for this to be an issue?
So all your sun comes from the side? I'm confused. I grow veggies that need 8 hours of direct sun. I use shade cloth for some of them but nothing like the full on block of a pv rooff.
let the PVs go and ul see plants growing in record times . otherwise plants just grow in the shade too . Just the differece betwwen a rocky sun starved nordic country and the amazon forest .
When elites stop using private jets I might start giving a tiny hoot about climate idiocy. Instead of spending 100'$ of Billion$ on wars, they could have used it to discover & pay for new ways to feed house & clothe the world.
Thousands of recipe videos on You Tube. But farming is where it all starts! Yet how many videos are there about how our food is grown? (A dozen, maybe?) Foundational topic, passionate presenter, and lots of stuff I never knew about. Excellent work.
There's an increasing amount of activity on reversing soil degradation and desertification too. As a starting point, I'd recommend searching YT for 'Fools and Dreamers' (a project started nearly 40 years ago in NZ). To give you an idea of how much progress has been made in the interim, there's now a live project to 'green' the Sanai peninsula. This one is both ambitious (being an area close to that of Belgium) and if successful, would represent more of a "marathon forward" than a "great stride forward" .... and what's occurring in China means, amongst many other projects, one started by a stubborn subsistence farmer's wife, whose 30 year journey was (partially!) recognised by carrying a stage of the Beijing Olympic Torch and another by six villagers (this one's now on their 3rd generation of the wonderfully stubborn), they're on the verge of "losing" a complete desert in Inner Mongolia (according to the dictionary definition of a desert), which will drastically reduce the epic sandstorms which affect cities downwind (i.e. predominantly east) of the deserts There's no one solution to restoring land to health and the methods range from returning to ancient methods (e.g. optimising water retention in the Sahal) to cutting edge low carbon water desalination and recovery of marine silts, often deposited by catastrophic run-off of stormwater. See recent weather reports from several areas not currently ablaze for details of runoff.
A couple of topics I want to raise to spice conversation: most of new tech is being developed in a industrial farming mindset, for big scale farms with investment capability. Tech for small farmers normally comes through farm adaptations made by individual farmer's effort... Another thing is distribution of value throughout the food chain, the farmers normally get the smallest slice as they are often cut off from the end markets - this led to a collapse in the number of farmers in most so called industrialized countries since the middle of the XX century, not by choice but by destruction of livelihoods and, some times, forced migration to escape poverty. The result is a tendency towards oligopolies and oligopsonies. I think more research should focus on small and medium farmers' viability, recognizing also the social, environmental and economic benefits of having vibrant, liveable rural areas instead of industrial monocrop landscapes - which tend to be the beneficiaries of most R&D investments
Actually the reason why vanilla is expensive is that they have to be have to be hand pollination as we have almost completely removed the species that pollinate them.
I havebeen saying for a while that all these empty office buildings after the pandemic should be used for vertical farming and be subsidized. The drastic reduction in transportation cost and benefit to the environment from having locally grown greens is huge.
That's a great idea, as a real estate investor, I will definitely take a second look at this, and as an electrician, I have to think about the power issues as well...lol
As I age, I am excited about being able to set up something (small scale) in my garden to reduce the number of weeds I have to pull. The real up side is the reduction of labor, chemicals, and effort. This would prompt home growers to grow their own food.
That's the real revolution that the greedy selfish evil corporations don't want you to think about, and that's what I'm all about! Grow your own thanks to tech. The real social security is food and shelter
This weed killing laser is a great idea. Would think there would be less weight pressure from tires compressing the soil too as no heavy spray liquids need carrying.
@@tmoosymuch smaller tractors would be needed! Maybe even versatile EV tractors. You don’t want to make a combined machine. Separate modules are easier to maintain.
@@docbrown6550 at least provide an explanation why or supply a link. I’m center left and only thing I see as issue is the potential to start a wildfire. Might not be an issue on irrigated field.
You're welcome! I grew up on a small dairy farm, and also returned to Ag while caring for my parents in their 80's. The best way to be a steward of the earth is to assist nature, not fight it. :) Even the John Deere company realized this decades ago. one of their big ad tag lines was "If you feed the soil, the soil will feed you."
Farmers are the most underappreciated people on the planet. They are botanists, biologists, meteorologists, futures traders, mechanics, veterinarians, accountants, pest controllers, heavy vehicle drivers and businessmen and still manage to sleep and have families. I've still probably missed some essential skill of theirs. They deserve all the praise and help they can get.
Thank you for this interesting and educational presentation. You are absolutely correct that the vast majority of people don’t give a second thought to food production.
Ok the laser weeder is the bomb diggity! That's awesome! Also, I've always noticed that weeds and plants in general seem to grow better/faster in lightly shaded areas. Partially covering crops with solar panels seems like a win. Time will tell.
Solar developers pay farmers on the high end $2,000/acre to lease the land for a solar farm. For the 10 acre farm: 10 / 3 * $2,000 = $6,666/year. Many project are unviable due to government regulation and lack of electrical infrastructure to transport the power to the city.
Vertical farms have very little profit, and many have no profit. -Areas with high electrical cost don’t work. -Areas in the countryside don’t work, traditional farming is cheaper -Big city you can sell the food for more but the real estate cost is to high
Both the targeted herbicide and laser are interesting. As with all things, the upfront and maintenance costs as well as reliability of the sensor systems when they get sprayed with mud and other matter that end up in farm fields will be interesting.
That laser system in action was on an other level! One of the most impressive things I've seen in a long time honestly. My question is how effective it is at actually destroying some weeds. Like did it actually completely kill them down to the root? Also costs for the chemical laser. I'd like to see a rechargable laser. CRISPR is improving some crops now. Sadly people are going to be against it - hypocrites.
The biggest costs for vertical farming are electricity costs for LEDs and for ventilation. If passive ventilation and natural sunlight is used with mirrors and lenses (including fresnel lenses and fresnel mirrors), that cost could be significantly decreased, for example down to only needing to close the passive ventilation system for the duration of the night or when freezing is predicted or detected, to keep the plants from freezing, and to partially close the window blinds when the sunlight is too strong for the plants it reflects and/or refracts upon. And with climate change, we will see places which experience global warming increasingly using metal-sheet mirrors or other materials to effectively shade the plants from the scorching sun, especially during the hottest hours of the day. Even without a greenhouse, simply shading the plants for a few hours a day, which can be done passively by carefully choosing the angle of the shading parts/panels, could increase the output by having less plants wither due to excessive sunlight or heat, even if airflow is not restricted like it is with normal greenhouses (even if/when they are partially opened to natural airflow). Also, they have to focus on things which aren't so easy to grow that most people grow them already. For example, having very sweet fresh strawberries on shelves in freezing temperatures, which to also be grown without pesticides and without chemical fertilizers (though that doesn't mean one can't blend weeds with water and leave them in a dark-colored tank in sunlight to make compost tea, then strain the liquid and use it as liquid fertilizer, then take the solids and put them in a compost bin for making solid fertilizers more slowly, or feed them to fish in an aquaponics setup. And using plastic to which very thin reflective metal sheets (i.e. aluminium foil) is glued (or chemically attached) can be used to concentrate more sunlight onto a greenhouse, in places (i.e. near the poles or away from the equator) and time periods (during winters) with less light, for example in the form of fresnel mirror walls which can be several stories tall near the permanent-snow areas. It's something post-war Russia could do to prevent famines after having to pay for the war (i.e. the "special economic operation" affecting it's import-export, and lack of skilled people due to "early expiration" of life during the "special military operation" war, and internal turmoil reducing trade between parts of the country, and many other problems which could arise).
Another big issue with our land use is replacing diversity with a single type of plant. It's endangering many native bees and the plants & predators that depend on them. Vertical farming is at least addressing that concern, but clearly we need alternatives that are more economically resilient.
One benefit of vertical farming is that the total crop superstructure can be elevated above flood levels, which, given the current and projected incidence of severe flooding, has to be a worthwhile investment. We just need to figure out a way to give the livestock the same protections. Noah’s Ark seems to be suggesting answers to that though! Keep the videos coming Ricky, always very thought provoking content.
Worms and some insects are beneficial. BUT if the AI could learn which are “bad” or invasive, then THAT would be a game changer. It’s a quantum leap from my old magnifying glass! Moo-hoo-hoo-hoo-ha-ha-haaaaa! ☀️ 🐜 ☠️
My thought exactly, though bug systems might be based on vacume cleaner hose like principles as it's gona be hard to fry a bug without damaging plants where as suction offers a convenient way to get into a plant canopy which might offer concealment from a laser.
@@sambrusco672 That was what I was trying to say. Should have used “caterpillars” instead. Some insects indeed are beneficial. I live in farm country. Farmers use biocontrol around here all the time. A particular type of wasp to control whiteflies, ladybugs to control aphids, etc. The problem is there isn’t always a solution for every insect. Also, nuts and some crops are susceptible to fungal infections. If the lasers could burn off the infected sections while leaving healthy tissue, that might be helpful. I don’t know about that last. Anything to reduce the use of herbacides, insecticides, and fungalcides would be useful, both by lowering costs and for reducing runoff. One robot I read about was in development years ago, but I haven’t heard anything since. It basically crawled a field and sampled the soil at the base of each plant. It then analysed the sample and applied the exact amount and type of fertilizer required for just that plant. The following is from a decade old memory of reading the article, so take it with a grain of salt: The problems the developers had was getting the robot to recognize the plant base (which AI would be very suited to), and analyzing the soil fast enough. The sample arm was at the front, and the application arm was at the back, meaning that the sample had to be analyzed within the time it took for the robot to pass over the plant. The fastest they had been able to do it was 24 hours per acre. One of the ideas they had was to abandon the individual plant, and do small areas instead, but the article stated that that lowered the economic end of it too far. Another article was about the general use of robots. The idea was that the farmer would mount low power transmitters on poles around the field. Various robots would use these transmitters in a “mini GPS” manner. One robot to prepare the soil with plowing, fertilizing, and planting, another robot that would lay down drip feeder tubing to each plant to reduce water usage. Other specialized robots that would be periodically released into the field for pest control, pollination, etc. Another robot for harvesting. All in all, the article mentioned a constellation of 12 robots to handle everything from soup to nuts. The most complicated was the harvester that would require attachments for each type of crop. AI combined with modern PLCs would make all of these viable. AI to decide what action to take, and a PLC to take the action. The next problem is making them robust enough to last and economical enough to be worth the farmer’s consideration. Modular design would be critical for this, so one part failing doesn’t necessitate replacing the entire robot. I am pretty sure that we are just beginning a new green revolution. At the beginning of the last green revolution we saw the farmer go from horse and plow to heavy machinery operator. This new revolution will see them go from heavy machinery operator to robot repair and programmer. It used to be a given farmer could harvest one or two acres of corn before it rotted on the stalk. Now a single farmer can harvest hundreds of acres (see Iowa). Next, a farmer won’t harvest any. He will be back in the barn, working on robots. Along the way we should see much less water, fertilizer and insecticide use, much less crop losses, increased crop production per acre, and much less runoff into rivers. As a side effect, unskilled farm labor will become a rarity, and farm labor in general will be much reduced. On the other side, non crop farming is fixing to change also. If beef, pork, and poultry cell cloning can be successfully brought online, and can be tailored to have the look and texture of the original, everything changes. The two things most likely to kill this tech is purists who won’t eat anything but the real thing, and the food producers instinct to “improve” it. Once you get it so that I can’t tell the difference between a cloned and real T-bone, stop messing with it. If I can tell the difference, I will always go for the real thing. According to the latest demographic info, we may not need this tech. For some reason, most of the world seems to have stopped having babies. Chinese, Russian, and most European countries have reduced child production so much that this is effectively their last generation. In the case of the Chinese, the ethnic Han people effectively stopped 40 years ago. In Russia it was 20-30 years ago. In most of Europe, 20 years ago. In another 60 years, the vast majority of Europeans will be ethically middle eastern and african. Russia will be mostly central asians. China will still be China, but there will be no Han. Check out the posts made by Peter Zeihan over the last several years for more on that.
i am absolutely glad i found your channel .. its a treasure among so much garbage .. i am never not impressed by the subjects you choose to go over .. keep up the good work man
Something I’ve found hard to understand is why supermarkets in the U.K. haven’t fitted Solar to their roofs. They are huge users of power with all their freezers a open refrigerators which on a warm summers day could be run from solar as well as their air conditioning. In France I often see car parks with canopies covered in solar panels.
It has just become law in France that any car park with more than 80 spaces has to be fitted with a solar canopy. As well as generating energy, cars are sheltered from the sun, reducing AC draw when restarted. The arrays also keep the surface of the car park cooler which will help keep local temperature lower. A great idea that needs repeating everywhere.
I like the stats here "water shortages and drought conditions are becoming much more common IN THE NEWS." The perceived value of a new product based on the current news cycle.
One of the heads of the US Department of Agriculture once said "there is money to be made in food as long as you're not growing it" I don't remember the name I can't find it online. However most of the systems you mentioned are sort of growing food but are heavily dependent on technology and therefore on fossil fuels, you cannot grow food forever on limited resources.
People forget but when I was young food was seasonal. You ate what was in season. Now with modern tech and logistics you can have veggies year round and eat what you want to eat.
I have a small plot, about 1200m2 or ~12900ft2. I decided to not grow useless grass lawn. Instead I have 9 chickens in the middle of my 286m2/3078ft2 vegetable garden. Chickens are giving me eggs and feeds the garden, the garden feeds the chicken. I planted 12 fruit trees in the backyard orchard culture style, I planted a lot of soft fruit bushes. My lawn isn't lawn. It's a meadow that I don't fertilize or water. I have a lot of wildflowers and even found today a prying mantis which isn't than common in my country. My point is that if we could stop wasting recourses on useless things and instead of being consumers we could became producers maybe it would be better for our wallets and nature? I'm not going to be 100% self sufficient with this setup but imagine cities with orchards and vegetable gardens in every backyard. How much we could produce to eat and to share with others. Why our parks are mainly focused on ornamentals instead of food giving plants? I don't get this world.
I always wanted to see a vertical farming setup with sun tunnels on the southern walls directing the light to the plants. Use the LEDs to backup for overcast days and to supplement and fine tune the wavelengths
One thing to note: without massive legislative changes agrovoltaics will not be selling their energy for anywhere near $0.10 per kwh. Unless you are willing to basically become an entity under the utility or find some other state contract you'll be lucky to get more than a cent per kwh generated.
As a farmer, I consider vertical farming to be economic madness. Our margins are already small. It makes no sense to pay for electricity, lights, water, substrate, a building and climate control when the earth already provides them. But I wouldn't mind having one of those weed killing robots.
Gotta have more mangoes for sure 😉 On a serious note, its not vertical farming that's the game changer, its Aquaponics. Consider the cyclic ecosystem nearly 0 waste and the fact that fish dusn need sunlight, its massive amounts of biomass created per sq m, if the entire system is AI weather controlled.
Politicians: We're all going to die! Engineers: I've got an idea. Let's try.... I subscribe to couple free applied engineering magazines not because I'm an engineer (I'm not!), but because when the news gets depressing, I read an article by real problem solvers. It's good for the soul --- like this video.
there is ONE farm tool that NEEDs to be invented ... let me explain 1) here is how other people plant Lawn grass -- they use a seed spreader to sow the grass seeds 2) a MUCH BETTER way ........(a) I place the seeds in a 5 Gallon bucket -- then fill it with water and let it soak for 2 days ...................(i) this will get the seeds to germinate using 1% of the water ........(b) I then use a thatching rack on the ground to light-scrap it ........(c) I put some, NOT too much BUT some topsoil on the area ........(d) then I place the wet germinated seeds on the area aND sprinkle a little water ........(e) cover with topsoil aND there is a growth explosion using 1% of the water ,,,. Grains like Corn -- Wheat -- Rice are ALL Grasses if speed planters could use WET almost Germinated seeds -- instead of the dry seeds they use now there would be a significant reduction in water usage
Foooooood. It's what matters most. With what is happening in the world, we'll all rely on advanced farming more and more. Honestly, we should be diving headlong into these technologies.
Calculations show that the food we produce today would already be enough for 20bn people. Our main issue is not that we don't produce enough, but that we throw away too much. In parts, because people buy food that they don't use, in other parts, because throwing it away is cheaper then sending it around the world to give out for free. The vast majority of food in this world is still grown and harvested by hand. In those parts we can essentially skip the "Trucks and Pesticides"-Step of agriculture and create even more sustainable ways of growing food.
I have a new invention: It uses solar energy, with minimal water, and it restores soil health meanwhile it gives the best most nutritional food that you can imagine. I call it cattle.
These technology advances are great, but they are very capital intensive. If the carbon robotics equipment has a continuous duty cycle, then I see promise in FaaS (Farming as a Service) where the equipment is deployed to farmers without the farmer providing capital outlay. Vertical farming has promise as well, but so many companies have failed because of uncontrolled variable costs. especially energy (electricity) expenses. Thin margins and high capital costs make for a tough investment environment.
I would say the biggest problem with agriculture is the marketing an distribution om produce. Farmers working for 4 to 7 months to produce food for the world and end up not even making a third of the price it was sold for at the supermarket. This is what is suppressing the farm industry.
as a vineyard owner i like the idea of Agrivoltaics but theres one massive problem thats just as big if not bigger then the upfront costs Red-Tape with the amount of power you will be pumping back in to the grid you are now a full on power provider thus you have all the red-tape that comes with it and its a lot i spoke with all the lawyers and solicitors in my town and they all said NO! one literally said GTFO! even the big shots in the city that specialize in this sort of red-tape wont do anything because i am not some massive power provider.
Vertical farming has another advantage you didn't mention. It can be done where the food is consumed, even in the same building you live in. Cuts down on transportation costs, reducing global warming footprint. And as climate change wrecks outdoor agriculture it will become essential to human survival.
The moment we can actually generate and store enough clean, cheap energy, that's going to be a game changer for so many fields, renewables can do it, but we need much cheaper and bigger energy storage batteries.
Imho, we need to rethink "energy storage" For example, if you want to use energy to pump water, using the hottest time of the day to pump the water to an elevated tank and then just let gravity do the watering whenever you need it, is vastly superior to storing the electricity in a battery and pumping it when you need it. As an added benefit, any very hot day would also yield more solar power and be able to pump more water, while cloudy days where you need less water anyways, will also pump less. I think those will be the systems that revolutionize how we grow food and in general, live in this world.
In the year 1800 there was only 760 million people on the planet in 1940 there was 1.2 billion them numbers increased only because of modern day farming and the vast supply of food to feed the world. There is no shortage of food in the world right now, just a shortage of money to buy it.
You do realize that most farmers either plow under, or throw away 30%-40% of their crops, because they don't look pretty, or the demand is much lower than the supply. As for the vertical farming, there are thousands of big box stores that are empty, that can be retrofitted, and it already has a power system that can easily be used.
Take a look at farmbot (think CNC or 3D printer but over soil). I grew up on a small farm and it has issues mainly they are not farmers but someone who travels and needed something to tend their garden while away. At first it seems expensive, but compare it with the price of a tractor which keeps smaller farms out of the market. You can buy a many of the largest farmbots for the price of an entry level tractor. Then you need to fuel it. Farmbot can be powered by a small solar panel. I'd love to see the laser put on a farmbot since it would not need a CO2 laser so a cheep LED laser would be fine at that scale. However, it's old fashioned squish the weed method is fine. I would like to see an LED laser pest bug zapper on it, but again good old diatomatious earth is cheep.
Solar on top of vertical farms certainly makes sense, but considering one of the big advantages of vertical farming is well, being more vertical (more stuff per square meter of footprint), they're kind of fundamentally at odds with powering themselves (at just fully) with something like solar, which scales based on how many square feet of space you have for it.
What's the cost of the Laser machine and what size farm would benifit? Many times mom and pop can't afford this machine. This technology is great but usually large corporation farming truly benifit.
Maybe then another company can provide them as a service that farms pay for. Just like they pay for pesticides. Farms dont generally manufacure their own pesticide. It would be expensive for them to start doing that too. If theyre smart the pesticide companies would add lasers to their options they have for their customers.
Small farms have for decades rented machines they needed beyond the ones they use all the time. I imagine it would depend how often you needed to use it--maybe one day every two weeks or so and one entrepreneur could buy one and rent it out to 10-15 local farmers.
1) Farmers! 2) If you don't think food is sexy, I challenge you to find a chef to marry, date, or simply add to your friend group--good food isn't just sexy, it's excelsior.
John Deere’s see and spray program is payed for on a $ per acre basis. It’s another input cost that needs more data to convince most farms to use it in dry land applications. In my area it’s only available for pre burn applications and not in crop applications so until it’s available for both most farms don’t see it as feasible. Blanket applications on average use 60% more herbicide so in theory one extra input cost is worthwhile and the future is promising. This also brings up issues of storing chemicals, most farms don’t have a heated, ventilated area where they can store chemical safely throughout the off season. Most farms buy exactly what they need for their blanket apps and don’t worry about storage. With see and spray it’s impossible to know how much herbicide you’re going to use, making projection’s impossible. The carbon robotics idea is amazing, but at 2ac/h it’s not anywhere feasible given the man hours unless it’s used on a small organic farm. Farms in mid/south sask take an average of 4000ac to feed one family unit conveniently.
For metrics, a self propelled sprayer with exact apply, aim command system, or appropriate fitted nozzles can do well over 200ac/h even though I wouldn’t recommend that efficiency unless you’re trying to stay within an application period
The real problem with agrivoltaicsis that it doesn't address one of the biggest problems with these large farms, monoculture farming which kills the soil. It actually might exasperate the issue since farmers can only use shade loving plants.
IIRC there is still more than enough light under the panels for just about any normal crop, arguably the larger issue is that most farm equipment is too large to fit under most agrivoltaic installations so the limiting thing becomes height and harvesting. The most successful ones I have heard of tend to have things like berries underneath them which are shorter and hand harvested but it is largely a problem of geometry and so should be relatively easy to change and optimize in any direction.
Have you been near a farm? Most farmers rotate corps. On our farm, it is soybeans (which add nitrogen to the soil) with wheat and corn during the other times.
@@alansnyder8448 yes, yes i have. Living in Virginia and traveling through the Carolinas I've seen hundreds of acres in the south growing tobacco only year after year. While I'm glad you and those you know "rotate your crops", studies have shown every year more than 440 million acres in the USA are used explicitly on monoculture. World wide and the problem is extremely worse, as many Western business's export their bad practices to other countries. Chile, Peru, Brazil, Nigeria, Ukraine are just a few countries of the top of my head that American countries cut down forest to grow single crops
@@katanaridingremy First I don't consider tobacco to be food, so don't smear the people who actually grow food with the practices of those who grow poison. I'm not intentionally picking on you, but I find TH-cam videos by people who haven't actually ever worked on a farm, with posts from people who have never worked on a farm complaining about problems that aren't real and offering solutions that would not work, to be a little annoying. Every farmer in this area rotates their crops and anyone who didn't would go out of business, and would be replaced by someone that did. One thing that has recently started happening at our farm is to reduce chemical fertilizer use, we truck in the cow manure from the local dairy farms and till it into the soil. But most annoying about videos like this one, is the miss information in it. The number one reason for the increased yields of farmers even from 15 years ago is the genetically modified strains actually increase the yield of food, and this should be considered a good thing in feeding a world of 8 billion people which actually was even possible 20 years ago. As long as people who don't know what they are talking about stay out of farmer's business they will be able to keep feeding the world.
In Europe they have found that growing crops under solar led to much greater efficiency. Imagine the advantages in hot climates where there is too much sun.
I once saw a bumper sticker that read if you can read this thank a teacher. Some time later I saw another that read if you ate something today thank a farmer.
I have to question the ratio of farmers to people fed. Is that taking into account the number of individual/family farms vs the corporate farms? Because corporate farms have greatly offset the balance that used to exist. I wonder about vertical farming - should they try franchising and making kits available for people to place them on top of skyscrapers in big cities?
I read that a product made with vinegar ( much more than just that ). This really needs to be developed, a fertilizer type that gets photosynthesis to happen without the sun or grow lights. I can't say anything else about it as it all was over my head. I do use led grow lights indoors but if the grids went down, I live in an apartment without a balcony, so growing would be out for me and the millions in the same situation.
Their is always an extensive bank of weed seed present in soil. Weeds are natures way of protecting and providing for itself. The healthier the soil, the more thriving the population of micro organisms is, the more broad range of species grown, the less weeds one will get. I still occasionally get weed pressure that is bad enough to threaten the cash crop. If it’s in the crop row, I let it outpace the crop and make a weed zapper run, a huge generator that attaches to the rear PTO, and a tool bar on the front of the tractor with copper rods. It smokes anything it hits instantly. I grow some heritage corn like blue hoppi, bloody butcher, a couple of popcorns, sweet corn varieties, and a few great high protein animal feed grade corn varieties. Very short season and lower yielding varieties, but better nourishment and flavor for the consumer, both the 4 legged kind and people. The point of my rambling is that getting connected to the land is the answer. Their is no silver bullet coming from technology. The tech is a force multiplier, often freeing the farmer up to do more for longer. But it can’t save the world. What can, is the consumer to make better choices and getting to know their farmers, and de-corporatizing the supply chain. It would coincide with the largest leap forward of quality health and wellness.
These developments are really exciting. Thank you for highlighting. I would argue some of the new tech would have farmers shaking in their boots, precision fermentation is likely to bankrupt many dairies. But the premise of the video about feeding the word is a bit flawed, 60 percent of all agricultural land / water and other inputs goes into feeding livestock. We can all make a big difference by reducing our meat intake, then the world will have plenty of food.
First thanks to the author for this video. It is more balanced than I imply in my response. I'll just point out something convenient which is GMOs are what have increased yields to the point that we can feed 8 billion people, and I think GMOs will continue to be the most important factor in that advance. --- My family has owned a farm in Michigan since 1946, and yes improved technology IS increasing farmer productivity, but it isn't any of the technologies you listed here. I don't see any of these near our farm, which rotates between wheat, soybeans, and corn, and has dairy and chicken farms nearby. The technologies that have caused the biggest yield increase are first genetically modified crops which grow more efficiently than what was seen even 15 years ago. The wheat is shorter but it has more seed per acre than in the past and the corn grows faster and is taller and both now have longer growing seasons. The second biggest improvement I've seen is the use of drone technology for herbicides. Before a "crop duster" plane used to just do the entire field, but the drones can do a quick survey first to know the areas that need it and put more where needed and less where not needed. (This one is similar to what you did say in the video, but it was aerial instead of on a tractor. Finally, the last one, is we don't use chemical fertilizers anymore on the field. Instead, between crops we buy cow manure from the local dairy farmers and have a new type of tractor. Till it into the ground. And we are not talking about a small amount. It was like a dozen tractor-trailer loads over a 100-acre field. I give this video a "C" for accuracy. I don't think agrivoltaics will ever be a thing here, because the poles needed to keep the solar panels out of the way of tractors will be (a) too capital intensive and (b) would restrict/reduce where tractors could operate. They might appear on "boutique" farms. Where city people go to gaslight themselves about the awesome future of farming but they will not move the needle in reality. Finally "vertical farming", isn't going to work and really has already failed. A farm where you need to buy expensive electricity for light will never be able to compete against a farm where an acre of land costs just $10,000 and the sunlight is free. That one is for some alternate reality.
I should also add some more detail to the genetically modified crops because that is BY FAR the biggest improvement. My daughter who just finished a degree in biology from Duke University was doing research on ways to grow better tomato corps. In this research, she used CRISPER technology to modify about 100 tomato plants and they are all right now growing in a greenhouse on the Duke campus. It would be too long a post to go into the details of the specifics that are trying to modify, but if it works there will be a new strain of tomato plant that grows more efficiently in the future. This CRISPER technology applied to improving crops will be the biggest improvement to yields by far.
Hey Ricky: Random question but i live in the Pacific Northwest and we have been seeing a lot more Dry, Hot weather. Which leads to more Fire's, droughts, low water levels. (Basically a compounding issue. Impacting the environment, humans, atmosphere, fire's releasing lots of added carbon, etc.) *So I'm asking: (is it possible to cover the hypothetical idea of seeing if we can add specific things to increase moisture/cloud formation/rain in the atmosphere and even maybe help absorb some amount of the increased heat, etc. That has been reeking havoc on our "used to be temperate rainforest ecosystem with old growth forest's and wetlands..?" I really think if we can increase or improve the drought situation here in the PNW that it could have a ton of positive benefits to all sorts of other things in the surrounding environment and neighboring environments, etc. Idk.) I just had to ask?? Idk if we even have any viable options we can attempt to utilize but i think we should try before things get any worse....
Check out amazing things Cult Foods Is Working on! www.cultfoodscience.com/
( CULT:CSE | CULTF:OTC )
Please tell us why Bill Gates owns more than half of the farm land in the USA??
First you say 'thanks to all the farmers', then you promote FAKE food???? Sounds anti-farmer to me.
Then you want them to farm around solar panels....... You need to spend some TIME Working on a Farm.
Please do your diligence on how they actually make the cultured meat. I have and it's definitely not for me and the environmental benefits are not proven.
@@kerryb2689 my family was farming I think very highly of farmers! There is a lot of money to be made in farming! The issue today is that there are bad people who are corrupting the industry and destroying crops and the animals so we all have to pay more for our food! Bill Gates is not buying the land to farm he is buying it to starve us! As well he wants us to eat fake food so they can put chemicals in our bodies why you ask just use your brain and think about it!!
@@dangraff8467 you're?
Any farmer will tell you that staying in business is really hard. The joke is: A farmer won the lottery and someone asked him what he was going to do with all that money. The farmer said," Well, I guess I'll just keep farming until it's all gone."
If you think a farmer isn't gambling, figure out how much they make vs invested capital, and go look at their books. Are some rich? Yes, but there are many that scrape by and barely make it or have to sell it all and do something else. It is a business like every other. There are winners and there are loosers, and the odds of loosing are higher than winning especially if you stay with 'it always worked for grandpa'.
@@servant74One of the saddest things is that farms are incredibly capital intensive, so when a farmer passes away sometimes their assets show that they might have a multi-million dollar net worth, but it's all tied up in tractors and barns. It certainly not liquid. So a lot of times the death tax can be the end of a family farm unfortunately.
@lestermarshall6501 that is not joke that is the truth. Only Corporate Farms make a profit because they get more advantages in Income Tax and other such things that a Family Farmer is denied.
@@philipvecchio3292yeah a certain political person was trying to get rid of the death tax but they are trying get rid of him. Tells you what they really are trying to do to people.
Thank you for posting that joke so I didn't have to.
The reduction of herbicides is probably one of the most important agricultural discoveries of the last hundred years. As for AI being adapted for weeding, it will mark a revolution in food cost through the reduction of labour, the speed of operation and the time taken to market. All good news as far as I can see. Great video, thanks. 😊
The most important is genetic engineering.
Many years ago I asked my grandmother, a farm wife, "What was the greatest invention in your lifetime?"
Her response was, "The combine"
Did she also say, "Idon't care what they tell you in school. Cleopatra was black! ✊🏿"
RICKY, for agrovoltaics, you didn’t include that the panels can concentrate rain and dew to the CROP instead of all over the place. Alternatively, rainwater could be captured with gutters, stored and then precisely distributed to the crop as needed via pipes MOUNTED to the posts that support the panels.
great idea
Brilliant!
Used solar panels are really cheap. Most farms have enough space that panels performing at 90% of capacity won't be a problem. Simply the shade of the panel is helping the farm. The cheaper they can get the panels, the more crops they can shade. I see farm solar as the go-to place to put "second life" solar panels. The supply of which will only increase over time, as new installations go to higher efficiency panels.
Nope, there is nothing better than few hectoliters of monsanto special elixir. 3 times per year.
Dew. I knew it. Tech brings us one step closer to watering our crops with Mt. Dew.
That laser gadget could smoke a lot of WEED in a field. 🤣LOL
Yeah, but what about the war on drugs?
recently saw a video about a company growing veggies in water pumped out of fishtanks. So basically the food is eating the fish poo and filtering the water that goes back to the fish. I think there is a lot of potential in that because there will always be companies breeding freshwater fish on a large scale.
Aquaponics its the best we have yet of a complete cyclic ecosystem .
@@DeeP_BosEYeah that is why so many of them have failed?
It has a long way to go for large scale agriculture.
@@dianapennepacker6854 an investor's first thought is that aquaponics is a 1960s fad that's now only used for illegal drugs so they're not interested which means that if you _do_ get up & running, when something expensive breaks your business has collapsed before you find funding for the replacement part.
Economics & its fads, not science or agriculture, is what's killed aquaponics.
It takes more than one type of food source to create a balanced circle of life. We have tried and failed several times with bio domes but I think we are getting closer.
I think last time, not enough focus was made with mycological input.
@@gary.richardson its impossible to have a plant only depending on ammonia in fish waste. It needs other chemicals that are in the hydroponic mix. It is a balanced cycle like a pond just the habitat of plants is separate from the fish, unlike a pond. The problem arises when v add methods to curb pathogens. There are probiotics that gets wasted . Including mycobacterium. Like say UV which kills all biotics.
I've worked on a farm and being able to 'weed' via laser would be so much better!!!
Do you think there might be issues with accidentally triggering wildfires with this technique or is there too much water around crops for this to be an issue?
Essentialy lasers are an upgraded version of flame weeding which has been a staple of organic weed control.
Is he on that stupid non-GMO bandwagon?
I have a greenhouse with a PV roof. Never had a problem growing things in it so I’m sure it can be used on the acres of industrial greenhouses
Greenhouses, my dude. Love 'em.
So all your sun comes from the side? I'm confused. I grow veggies that need 8 hours of direct sun. I use shade cloth for some of them but nothing like the full on block of a pv rooff.
let the PVs go and ul see plants growing in record times . otherwise plants just grow in the shade too . Just the differece betwwen a rocky sun starved nordic country and the amazon forest .
When elites stop using private jets I might start giving a tiny hoot about climate idiocy. Instead of spending 100'$ of Billion$ on wars, they could have used it to discover & pay for new ways to feed house & clothe the world.
Thousands of recipe videos on You Tube. But farming is where it all starts! Yet how many videos are there about how our food is grown? (A dozen, maybe?) Foundational topic, passionate presenter, and lots of stuff I never knew about. Excellent work.
There's an increasing amount of activity on reversing soil degradation and desertification too. As a starting point, I'd recommend searching YT for 'Fools and Dreamers' (a project started nearly 40 years ago in NZ). To give you an idea of how much progress has been made in the interim, there's now a live project to 'green' the Sanai peninsula. This one is both ambitious (being an area close to that of Belgium) and if successful, would represent more of a "marathon forward" than a "great stride forward" .... and what's occurring in China means, amongst many other projects, one started by a stubborn subsistence farmer's wife, whose 30 year journey was (partially!) recognised by carrying a stage of the Beijing Olympic Torch and another by six villagers (this one's now on their 3rd generation of the wonderfully stubborn), they're on the verge of "losing" a complete desert in Inner Mongolia (according to the dictionary definition of a desert), which will drastically reduce the epic sandstorms which affect cities downwind (i.e. predominantly east) of the deserts
There's no one solution to restoring land to health and the methods range from returning to ancient methods (e.g. optimising water retention in the Sahal) to cutting edge low carbon water desalination and recovery of marine silts, often deposited by catastrophic run-off of stormwater. See recent weather reports from several areas not currently ablaze for details of runoff.
Farming was a mistake and should never have been allowed to get started.
A couple of topics I want to raise to spice conversation: most of new tech is being developed in a industrial farming mindset, for big scale farms with investment capability. Tech for small farmers normally comes through farm adaptations made by individual farmer's effort... Another thing is distribution of value throughout the food chain, the farmers normally get the smallest slice as they are often cut off from the end markets - this led to a collapse in the number of farmers in most so called industrialized countries since the middle of the XX century, not by choice but by destruction of livelihoods and, some times, forced migration to escape poverty. The result is a tendency towards oligopolies and oligopsonies.
I think more research should focus on small and medium farmers' viability, recognizing also the social, environmental and economic benefits of having vibrant, liveable rural areas instead of industrial monocrop landscapes - which tend to be the beneficiaries of most R&D investments
Preach
Actually the reason why vanilla is expensive is that they have to be have to be hand pollination as we have almost completely removed the species that pollinate them.
I havebeen saying for a while that all these empty office buildings after the pandemic should be used for vertical farming and be subsidized. The drastic reduction in transportation cost and benefit to the environment from having locally grown greens is huge.
I could agree with that but they would need to be modified to have less energy consumption
that's an interesting idea! might be a zoning issue though?
they weren't built with those moisture loads in mind either and would need hvac modifications as well
You would need to tear down walls
That's a great idea, as a real estate investor, I will definitely take a second look at this, and as an electrician, I have to think about the power issues as well...lol
Thank you for this video, that laser weeder is just about the coolest tech I have ever seen, more impactful than the Apple Vision pro.
Hahahahaha, that was a good one!
As I age, I am excited about being able to set up something (small scale) in my garden to reduce the number of weeds I have to pull. The real up side is the reduction of labor, chemicals, and effort. This would prompt home growers to grow their own food.
Ya, I'm not dropping this kind of money for a back yard grow. It doesn't even target insects and cats.
hahaha
@@y0nd3r
That's the real revolution that the greedy selfish evil corporations don't want you to think about, and that's what I'm all about! Grow your own thanks to tech. The real social security is food and shelter
This weed killing laser is a great idea. Would think there would be less weight pressure from tires compressing the soil too as no heavy spray liquids need carrying.
you'd think it could be converted to be robotic too, drive itself on a set path and not need a tractor to drag it around.
@@docbrown6550oh really… who said that? Where’s the proof?
@@tmoosymuch smaller tractors would be needed! Maybe even versatile EV tractors. You don’t want to make a combined machine. Separate modules are easier to maintain.
@@docbrown6550 at least provide an explanation why or supply a link. I’m center left and only thing I see as issue is the potential to start a wildfire. Might not be an issue on irrigated field.
Is he on that stupid non-GMO bandwagon?
You're welcome! I grew up on a small dairy farm, and also returned to Ag while caring for my parents in their 80's. The best way to be a steward of the earth is to assist nature, not fight it. :) Even the John Deere company realized this decades ago. one of their big ad tag lines was "If you feed the soil, the soil will feed you."
With vertical farming in addition to solar panels you would likely want to add some form of wind power to help keep the growlights going
yeah 1 area of solar panel can at the most support 1 floor of led lighting, so much losses in conversion it isnt feasible yet .
Farmers are the most underappreciated people on the planet. They are botanists, biologists, meteorologists, futures traders, mechanics, veterinarians, accountants, pest controllers, heavy vehicle drivers and businessmen and still manage to sleep and have families.
I've still probably missed some essential skill of theirs.
They deserve all the praise and help they can get.
Thank you for this interesting and educational presentation. You are absolutely correct that the vast majority of people don’t give a second thought to food production.
Ok the laser weeder is the bomb diggity! That's awesome!
Also, I've always noticed that weeds and plants in general seem to grow better/faster in lightly shaded areas. Partially covering crops with solar panels seems like a win. Time will tell.
Solar developers pay farmers on the high end $2,000/acre to lease the land for a solar farm. For the 10 acre farm: 10 / 3 * $2,000 = $6,666/year.
Many project are unviable due to government regulation and lack of electrical infrastructure to transport the power to the city.
First thing I thought when I saw the Laser weed killer - "No fire hazard here!"
But Rock, who wants to EAT this Frankenstein food?? You go first!!!😂😂
Great video! Would have loved to see Aquaponics on the list though, just the idea of it is so cool! Even if it has some challenges to overcome still.
IMHO, aquaponics and hydroponics should be complementary tech. I am sure there are MANY details I don't see that could change that too.
Vertical farms have very little profit, and many have no profit.
-Areas with high electrical cost don’t work.
-Areas in the countryside don’t work, traditional farming is cheaper
-Big city you can sell the food for more but the real estate cost is to high
Yes someone who gets it. I think most of the posters here have never been on a real farm.
That laser robot that shoots weeds is amazing. No chemicals makes it a fantastic technology.
Both the targeted herbicide and laser are interesting. As with all things, the upfront and maintenance costs as well as reliability of the sensor systems when they get sprayed with mud and other matter that end up in farm fields will be interesting.
That laser system in action was on an other level! One of the most impressive things I've seen in a long time honestly.
My question is how effective it is at actually destroying some weeds. Like did it actually completely kill them down to the root?
Also costs for the chemical laser. I'd like to see a rechargable laser.
CRISPR is improving some crops now. Sadly people are going to be against it - hypocrites.
The biggest costs for vertical farming are electricity costs for LEDs and for ventilation. If passive ventilation and natural sunlight is used with mirrors and lenses (including fresnel lenses and fresnel mirrors), that cost could be significantly decreased, for example down to only needing to close the passive ventilation system for the duration of the night or when freezing is predicted or detected, to keep the plants from freezing, and to partially close the window blinds when the sunlight is too strong for the plants it reflects and/or refracts upon. And with climate change, we will see places which experience global warming increasingly using metal-sheet mirrors or other materials to effectively shade the plants from the scorching sun, especially during the hottest hours of the day.
Even without a greenhouse, simply shading the plants for a few hours a day, which can be done passively by carefully choosing the angle of the shading parts/panels, could increase the output by having less plants wither due to excessive sunlight or heat, even if airflow is not restricted like it is with normal greenhouses (even if/when they are partially opened to natural airflow). Also, they have to focus on things which aren't so easy to grow that most people grow them already.
For example, having very sweet fresh strawberries on shelves in freezing temperatures, which to also be grown without pesticides and without chemical fertilizers (though that doesn't mean one can't blend weeds with water and leave them in a dark-colored tank in sunlight to make compost tea, then strain the liquid and use it as liquid fertilizer, then take the solids and put them in a compost bin for making solid fertilizers more slowly, or feed them to fish in an aquaponics setup.
And using plastic to which very thin reflective metal sheets (i.e. aluminium foil) is glued (or chemically attached) can be used to concentrate more sunlight onto a greenhouse, in places (i.e. near the poles or away from the equator) and time periods (during winters) with less light, for example in the form of fresnel mirror walls which can be several stories tall near the permanent-snow areas. It's something post-war Russia could do to prevent famines after having to pay for the war (i.e. the "special economic operation" affecting it's import-export, and lack of skilled people due to "early expiration" of life during the "special military operation" war, and internal turmoil reducing trade between parts of the country, and many other problems which could arise).
While better than most farming None of those techniques are sustainable let alone Regenerative. Research Regenerative Farming.
Another big issue with our land use is replacing diversity with a single type of plant. It's endangering many native bees and the plants & predators that depend on them. Vertical farming is at least addressing that concern, but clearly we need alternatives that are more economically resilient.
I want to see the
Laser weeder in action.
How about looking at aquaponics? A self contained ecological cycle that can produce fish and produce in an ongoing manner
Thank you for helping me remember what I've already known ...food is the new gold....
Soon 0 Farmers will feed all the people.
One benefit of vertical farming is that the total crop superstructure can be elevated above flood levels, which, given the current and projected incidence of severe flooding, has to be a worthwhile investment. We just need to figure out a way to give the livestock the same protections. Noah’s Ark seems to be suggesting answers to that though! Keep the videos coming Ricky, always very thought provoking content.
I saw an experiment where they tested purple LEDs against white LEDs of the same wattage, and the plants did better under the white LEDs.
The laser weeder is amazing. Now if they can train it to kill insects and worms…
Worms and some insects are beneficial. BUT if the AI could learn which are “bad” or invasive, then THAT would be a game changer.
It’s a quantum leap from my old magnifying glass!
Moo-hoo-hoo-hoo-ha-ha-haaaaa!
☀️ 🐜 ☠️
I would buy it i it did that. So sick of the squash bugs and potato beetles damaging my garden.
My thought exactly, though bug systems might be based on vacume cleaner hose like principles as it's gona be hard to fry a bug without damaging plants where as suction offers a convenient way to get into a plant canopy which might offer concealment from a laser.
@@sambrusco672 That was what I was trying to say. Should have used “caterpillars” instead. Some insects indeed are beneficial. I live in farm country. Farmers use biocontrol around here all the time. A particular type of wasp to control whiteflies, ladybugs to control aphids, etc. The problem is there isn’t always a solution for every insect. Also, nuts and some crops are susceptible to fungal infections. If the lasers could burn off the infected sections while leaving healthy tissue, that might be helpful. I don’t know about that last. Anything to reduce the use of herbacides, insecticides, and fungalcides would be useful, both by lowering costs and for reducing runoff.
One robot I read about was in development years ago, but I haven’t heard anything since. It basically crawled a field and sampled the soil at the base of each plant. It then analysed the sample and applied the exact amount and type of fertilizer required for just that plant. The following is from a decade old memory of reading the article, so take it with a grain of salt: The problems the developers had was getting the robot to recognize the plant base (which AI would be very suited to), and analyzing the soil fast enough. The sample arm was at the front, and the application arm was at the back, meaning that the sample had to be analyzed within the time it took for the robot to pass over the plant. The fastest they had been able to do it was 24 hours per acre. One of the ideas they had was to abandon the individual plant, and do small areas instead, but the article stated that that lowered the economic end of it too far.
Another article was about the general use of robots. The idea was that the farmer would mount low power transmitters on poles around the field. Various robots would use these transmitters in a “mini GPS” manner. One robot to prepare the soil with plowing, fertilizing, and planting, another robot that would lay down drip feeder tubing to each plant to reduce water usage. Other specialized robots that would be periodically released into the field for pest control, pollination, etc. Another robot for harvesting. All in all, the article mentioned a constellation of 12 robots to handle everything from soup to nuts. The most complicated was the harvester that would require attachments for each type of crop.
AI combined with modern PLCs would make all of these viable. AI to decide what action to take, and a PLC to take the action. The next problem is making them robust enough to last and economical enough to be worth the farmer’s consideration. Modular design would be critical for this, so one part failing doesn’t necessitate replacing the entire robot.
I am pretty sure that we are just beginning a new green revolution. At the beginning of the last green revolution we saw the farmer go from horse and plow to heavy machinery operator. This new revolution will see them go from heavy machinery operator to robot repair and programmer. It used to be a given farmer could harvest one or two acres of corn before it rotted on the stalk. Now a single farmer can harvest hundreds of acres (see Iowa). Next, a farmer won’t harvest any. He will be back in the barn, working on robots.
Along the way we should see much less water, fertilizer and insecticide use, much less crop losses, increased crop production per acre, and much less runoff into rivers. As a side effect, unskilled farm labor will become a rarity, and farm labor in general will be much reduced.
On the other side, non crop farming is fixing to change also. If beef, pork, and poultry cell cloning can be successfully brought online, and can be tailored to have the look and texture of the original, everything changes. The two things most likely to kill this tech is purists who won’t eat anything but the real thing, and the food producers instinct to “improve” it. Once you get it so that I can’t tell the difference between a cloned and real T-bone, stop messing with it. If I can tell the difference, I will always go for the real thing.
According to the latest demographic info, we may not need this tech. For some reason, most of the world seems to have stopped having babies. Chinese, Russian, and most European countries have reduced child production so much that this is effectively their last generation. In the case of the Chinese, the ethnic Han people effectively stopped 40 years ago. In Russia it was 20-30 years ago. In most of Europe, 20 years ago. In another 60 years, the vast majority of Europeans will be ethically middle eastern and african. Russia will be mostly central asians. China will still be China, but there will be no Han.
Check out the posts made by Peter Zeihan over the last several years for more on that.
20 seconds before i saw the laser weed killer i thought, maybe lasers is a good idea. Added to the list of "inventions" i invent too late lol
i am absolutely glad i found your channel .. its a treasure among so much garbage .. i am never not impressed by the subjects you choose to go over .. keep up the good work man
farming may be boring
But the technology behind modern and future farming is nothing but awe inspiring.
Something I’ve found hard to understand is why supermarkets in the U.K. haven’t fitted Solar to their roofs. They are huge users of power with all their freezers a open refrigerators which on a warm summers day could be run from solar as well as their air conditioning. In France I often see car parks with canopies covered in solar panels.
It has just become law in France that any car park with more than 80 spaces has to be fitted with a solar canopy.
As well as generating energy, cars are sheltered from the sun, reducing AC draw when restarted. The arrays also keep the surface of the car park cooler which will help keep local temperature lower.
A great idea that needs repeating everywhere.
What a time to be alive
Squeeze those papers
I like the stats here "water shortages and drought conditions are becoming much more common IN THE NEWS." The perceived value of a new product based on the current news cycle.
Ricky, thank you for your wonderfully encouraging video.
Sheila Mink
in New Mexico
One of the heads of the US Department of Agriculture once said "there is money to be made in food as long as you're not growing it" I don't remember the name I can't find it online. However most of the systems you mentioned are sort of growing food but are heavily dependent on technology and therefore on fossil fuels, you cannot grow food forever on limited resources.
People forget but when I was young food was seasonal. You ate what was in season. Now with modern tech and logistics you can have veggies year round and eat what you want to eat.
I have a small plot, about 1200m2 or ~12900ft2. I decided to not grow useless grass lawn. Instead I have 9 chickens in the middle of my 286m2/3078ft2 vegetable garden. Chickens are giving me eggs and feeds the garden, the garden feeds the chicken. I planted 12 fruit trees in the backyard orchard culture style, I planted a lot of soft fruit bushes. My lawn isn't lawn. It's a meadow that I don't fertilize or water. I have a lot of wildflowers and even found today a prying mantis which isn't than common in my country.
My point is that if we could stop wasting recourses on useless things and instead of being consumers we could became producers maybe it would be better for our wallets and nature?
I'm not going to be 100% self sufficient with this setup but imagine cities with orchards and vegetable gardens in every backyard. How much we could produce to eat and to share with others. Why our parks are mainly focused on ornamentals instead of food giving plants?
I don't get this world.
I always wanted to see a vertical farming setup with sun tunnels on the southern walls directing the light to the plants. Use the LEDs to backup for overcast days and to supplement and fine tune the wavelengths
One thing to note: without massive legislative changes agrovoltaics will not be selling their energy for anywhere near $0.10 per kwh. Unless you are willing to basically become an entity under the utility or find some other state contract you'll be lucky to get more than a cent per kwh generated.
As a farmer, I consider vertical farming to be economic madness. Our margins are already small. It makes no sense to pay for electricity, lights, water, substrate, a building and climate control when the earth already provides them. But I wouldn't mind having one of those weed killing robots.
Gotta have more mangoes for sure 😉
On a serious note, its not vertical farming that's the game changer, its Aquaponics. Consider the cyclic ecosystem nearly 0 waste and the fact that fish dusn need sunlight, its massive amounts of biomass created per sq m, if the entire system is AI weather controlled.
Very interesting Ricky, thanks for sharing your research.
Politicians: We're all going to die!
Engineers: I've got an idea. Let's try....
I subscribe to couple free applied engineering magazines not because I'm an engineer (I'm not!), but because when the news gets depressing, I read an article by real problem solvers. It's good for the soul --- like this video.
there is ONE farm tool that NEEDs to be invented
...
let me explain
1) here is how other people plant Lawn grass -- they use a seed spreader to sow the grass seeds
2) a MUCH BETTER way
........(a) I place the seeds in a 5 Gallon bucket -- then fill it with water and let it soak for 2 days
...................(i) this will get the seeds to germinate using 1% of the water
........(b) I then use a thatching rack on the ground to light-scrap it
........(c) I put some, NOT too much BUT some topsoil on the area
........(d) then I place the wet germinated seeds on the area aND sprinkle a little water
........(e) cover with topsoil aND there is a growth explosion using 1% of the water
,,,.
Grains like Corn -- Wheat -- Rice are ALL Grasses
if speed planters could use WET almost Germinated seeds -- instead of the dry seeds they use now there would be a significant reduction in water usage
Foooooood. It's what matters most. With what is happening in the world, we'll all rely on advanced farming more and more. Honestly, we should be diving headlong into these technologies.
Calculations show that the food we produce today would already be enough for 20bn people.
Our main issue is not that we don't produce enough, but that we throw away too much.
In parts, because people buy food that they don't use, in other parts, because throwing it away is cheaper then sending it around the world to give out for free.
The vast majority of food in this world is still grown and harvested by hand. In those parts we can essentially skip the "Trucks and Pesticides"-Step of agriculture and create even more sustainable ways of growing food.
This must have been one expensive video to produce. The graphics are so impressive.
I have a new invention: It uses solar energy, with minimal water, and it restores soil health meanwhile it gives the best most nutritional food that you can imagine. I call it cattle.
Ricky, I've followed your channel since the early Tesla days. You're a good man doing good things. Thank you for all you share.
These technology advances are great, but they are very capital intensive. If the carbon robotics equipment has a continuous duty cycle, then I see promise in FaaS (Farming as a Service) where the equipment is deployed to farmers without the farmer providing capital outlay. Vertical farming has promise as well, but so many companies have failed because of uncontrolled variable costs. especially energy (electricity) expenses. Thin margins and high capital costs make for a tough investment environment.
I would say the biggest problem with agriculture is the marketing an distribution om produce. Farmers working for 4 to 7 months to produce food for the world and end up not even making a third of the price it was sold for at the supermarket. This is what is suppressing the farm industry.
Cult food in a time of cults taking over food production😂 hilarious
as a vineyard owner i like the idea of Agrivoltaics but theres one massive problem thats just as big if not bigger then the upfront costs Red-Tape with the amount of power you will be pumping back in to the grid you are now a full on power provider thus you have all the red-tape that comes with it and its a lot i spoke with all the lawyers and solicitors in my town and they all said NO! one literally said GTFO! even the big shots in the city that specialize in this sort of red-tape wont do anything because i am not some massive power provider.
As a Christmas tree farm worker, landscaper, and biologist... I feel like I just saw the future with the laser weeder
It's old tech I guess 😂.... I use it on Farming Simulator 22
Vertical farming has another advantage you didn't mention. It can be done where the food is consumed, even in the same building you live in. Cuts down on transportation costs, reducing global warming footprint. And as climate change wrecks outdoor agriculture it will become essential to human survival.
The moment we can actually generate and store enough clean, cheap energy, that's going to be a game changer for so many fields, renewables can do it, but we need much cheaper and bigger energy storage batteries.
Imho, we need to rethink "energy storage"
For example, if you want to use energy to pump water, using the hottest time of the day to pump the water to an elevated tank and then just let gravity do the watering whenever you need it, is vastly superior to storing the electricity in a battery and pumping it when you need it.
As an added benefit, any very hot day would also yield more solar power and be able to pump more water, while cloudy days where you need less water anyways, will also pump less.
I think those will be the systems that revolutionize how we grow food and in general, live in this world.
All I see is the pride of man exerting its' will across the land.
In the year 1800 there was only 760 million people on the planet in 1940 there was 1.2 billion them numbers increased only because of modern day farming and the vast supply of food to feed the world. There is no shortage of food in the world right now, just a shortage of money to buy it.
Awesome video! Thank you.
You do realize that most farmers either plow under, or throw away 30%-40% of their crops, because they don't look pretty, or the demand is much lower than the supply. As for the vertical farming, there are thousands of big box stores that are empty, that can be retrofitted, and it already has a power system that can easily be used.
The robotic laser weed zapper is very cool technology.
I'd love to see low end version for our garden
Just a hand-held one would be all a guy would need for a garden
The easiest way to eliminate weeds, insects, and water waste is using greenhouses.
Take a look at farmbot (think CNC or 3D printer but over soil). I grew up on a small farm and it has issues mainly they are not farmers but someone who travels and needed something to tend their garden while away. At first it seems expensive, but compare it with the price of a tractor which keeps smaller farms out of the market. You can buy a many of the largest farmbots for the price of an entry level tractor. Then you need to fuel it. Farmbot can be powered by a small solar panel. I'd love to see the laser put on a farmbot since it would not need a CO2 laser so a cheep LED laser would be fine at that scale. However, it's old fashioned squish the weed method is fine. I would like to see an LED laser pest bug zapper on it, but again good old diatomatious earth is cheep.
Killing weeds with lasers will not kill the roots. Herbicides do. The 'Spot Spray' herbicide mobile was the best.
Electrocution!
Solar on top of vertical farms certainly makes sense, but considering one of the big advantages of vertical farming is well, being more vertical (more stuff per square meter of footprint), they're kind of fundamentally at odds with powering themselves (at just fully) with something like solar, which scales based on how many square feet of space you have for it.
What's the cost of the Laser machine and what size farm would benifit? Many times mom and pop can't afford this machine. This technology is great but usually large corporation farming truly benifit.
Maybe then another company can provide them as a service that farms pay for. Just like they pay for pesticides. Farms dont generally manufacure their own pesticide. It would be expensive for them to start doing that too.
If theyre smart the pesticide companies would add lasers to their options they have for their customers.
Small farms have for decades rented machines they needed beyond the ones they use all the time. I imagine it would depend how often you needed to use it--maybe one day every two weeks or so and one entrepreneur could buy one and rent it out to 10-15 local farmers.
1) Farmers!
2) If you don't think food is sexy, I challenge you to find a chef to marry, date, or simply add to your friend group--good food isn't just sexy, it's excelsior.
John Deere’s see and spray program is payed for on a $ per acre basis. It’s another input cost that needs more data to convince most farms to use it in dry land applications. In my area it’s only available for pre burn applications and not in crop applications so until it’s available for both most farms don’t see it as feasible. Blanket applications on average use 60% more herbicide so in theory one extra input cost is worthwhile and the future is promising. This also brings up issues of storing chemicals, most farms don’t have a heated, ventilated area where they can store chemical safely throughout the off season. Most farms buy exactly what they need for their blanket apps and don’t worry about storage. With see and spray it’s impossible to know how much herbicide you’re going to use, making projection’s impossible. The carbon robotics idea is amazing, but at 2ac/h it’s not anywhere feasible given the man hours unless it’s used on a small organic farm. Farms in mid/south sask take an average of 4000ac to feed one family unit conveniently.
For metrics, a self propelled sprayer with exact apply, aim command system, or appropriate fitted nozzles can do well over 200ac/h even though I wouldn’t recommend that efficiency unless you’re trying to stay within an application period
Monsanto has to be sweating buckets right now...
Another one I've been keeping an eye on, is Solar Foods and their Solein growing vats.
The real problem with agrivoltaicsis that it doesn't address one of the biggest problems with these large farms, monoculture farming which kills the soil. It actually might exasperate the issue since farmers can only use shade loving plants.
Ummm pretty sure most farmers rotate crops to àvoid that problem.
IIRC there is still more than enough light under the panels for just about any normal crop, arguably the larger issue is that most farm equipment is too large to fit under most agrivoltaic installations so the limiting thing becomes height and harvesting. The most successful ones I have heard of tend to have things like berries underneath them which are shorter and hand harvested but it is largely a problem of geometry and so should be relatively easy to change and optimize in any direction.
Have you been near a farm? Most farmers rotate corps. On our farm, it is soybeans (which add nitrogen to the soil) with wheat and corn during the other times.
@@alansnyder8448 yes, yes i have. Living in Virginia and traveling through the Carolinas I've seen hundreds of acres in the south growing tobacco only year after year. While I'm glad you and those you know "rotate your crops", studies have shown every year more than 440 million acres in the USA are used explicitly on monoculture. World wide and the problem is extremely worse, as many Western business's export their bad practices to other countries. Chile, Peru, Brazil, Nigeria, Ukraine are just a few countries of the top of my head that American countries cut down forest to grow single crops
@@katanaridingremy First I don't consider tobacco to be food, so don't smear the people who actually grow food with the practices of those who grow poison.
I'm not intentionally picking on you, but I find TH-cam videos by people who haven't actually ever worked on a farm, with posts from people who have never worked on a farm complaining about problems that aren't real and offering solutions that would not work, to be a little annoying.
Every farmer in this area rotates their crops and anyone who didn't would go out of business, and would be replaced by someone that did.
One thing that has recently started happening at our farm is to reduce chemical fertilizer use, we truck in the cow manure from the local dairy farms and till it into the soil.
But most annoying about videos like this one, is the miss information in it. The number one reason for the increased yields of farmers even from 15 years ago is the genetically modified strains actually increase the yield of food, and this should be considered a good thing in feeding a world of 8 billion people which actually was even possible 20 years ago.
As long as people who don't know what they are talking about stay out of farmer's business they will be able to keep feeding the world.
In Europe they have found that growing crops under solar led to much greater efficiency. Imagine the advantages in hot climates where there is too much sun.
I once saw a bumper sticker that read if you can read this thank a teacher. Some time later I saw another that read if you ate something today thank a farmer.
I have to question the ratio of farmers to people fed. Is that taking into account the number of individual/family farms vs the corporate farms? Because corporate farms have greatly offset the balance that used to exist. I wonder about vertical farming - should they try franchising and making kits available for people to place them on top of skyscrapers in big cities?
I read that a product made with vinegar ( much more than just that ). This really needs to be developed, a fertilizer type that gets photosynthesis to happen without the sun or grow lights. I can't say anything else about it as it all was over my head. I do use led grow lights indoors but if the grids went down, I live in an apartment without a balcony, so growing would be out for me and the millions in the same situation.
i appreciate what you do - always nice to see people looking for solutions instead of giving in to doomerism or threatening civil war.
Lazers with AI is definitely the coolest. Besides no poison, it leaves fertilizer from the burning weed.
Their is always an extensive bank of weed seed present in soil. Weeds are natures way of protecting and providing for itself. The healthier the soil, the more thriving the population of micro organisms is, the more broad range of species grown, the less weeds one will get.
I still occasionally get weed pressure that is bad enough to threaten the cash crop. If it’s in the crop row, I let it outpace the crop and make a weed zapper run, a huge generator that attaches to the rear PTO, and a tool bar on the front of the tractor with copper rods. It smokes anything it hits instantly. I grow some heritage corn like blue hoppi, bloody butcher, a couple of popcorns, sweet corn varieties, and a few great high protein animal feed grade corn varieties. Very short season and lower yielding varieties, but better nourishment and flavor for the consumer, both the 4 legged kind and people.
The point of my rambling is that getting connected to the land is the answer. Their is no silver bullet coming from technology. The tech is a force multiplier, often freeing the farmer up to do more for longer. But it can’t save the world. What can, is the consumer to make better choices and getting to know their farmers, and de-corporatizing the supply chain. It would coincide with the largest leap forward of quality health and wellness.
Automating rice farming, will be the big breakthrough
the supply chain is not "so good" its so complex and quite delicate actually
These developments are really exciting. Thank you for highlighting. I would argue some of the new tech would have farmers shaking in their boots, precision fermentation is likely to bankrupt many dairies. But the premise of the video about feeding the word is a bit flawed, 60 percent of all agricultural land / water and other inputs goes into feeding livestock. We can all make a big difference by reducing our meat intake, then the world will have plenty of food.
Worked on a farm in the Seventies, and I HATED weeding. Oh man, that laser weed killer is the BOMB!
I almost forgot I really love that we Zapper.
the real issue is less the growing of food and more having the transportation network to distribute it cost effectively where it's needed.
First thanks to the author for this video. It is more balanced than I imply in my response. I'll just point out something convenient which is GMOs are what have increased yields to the point that we can feed 8 billion people, and I think GMOs will continue to be the most important factor in that advance.
---
My family has owned a farm in Michigan since 1946, and yes improved technology IS increasing farmer productivity, but it isn't any of the technologies you listed here. I don't see any of these near our farm, which rotates between wheat, soybeans, and corn, and has dairy and chicken farms nearby.
The technologies that have caused the biggest yield increase are first genetically modified crops which grow more efficiently than what was seen even 15 years ago. The wheat is shorter but it has more seed per acre than in the past and the corn grows faster and is taller and both now have longer growing seasons.
The second biggest improvement I've seen is the use of drone technology for herbicides. Before a "crop duster" plane used to just do the entire field, but the drones can do a quick survey first to know the areas that need it and put more where needed and less where not needed. (This one is similar to what you did say in the video, but it was aerial instead of on a tractor.
Finally, the last one, is we don't use chemical fertilizers anymore on the field. Instead, between crops we buy cow manure from the local dairy farmers and have a new type of tractor. Till it into the ground. And we are not talking about a small amount. It was like a dozen tractor-trailer loads over a 100-acre field.
I give this video a "C" for accuracy. I don't think agrivoltaics will ever be a thing here, because the poles needed to keep the solar panels out of the way of tractors will be (a) too capital intensive and (b) would restrict/reduce where tractors could operate. They might appear on "boutique" farms. Where city people go to gaslight themselves about the awesome future of farming but they will not move the needle in reality.
Finally "vertical farming", isn't going to work and really has already failed. A farm where you need to buy expensive electricity for light will never be able to compete against a farm where an acre of land costs just $10,000 and the sunlight is free. That one is for some alternate reality.
I should also add some more detail to the genetically modified crops because that is BY FAR the biggest improvement.
My daughter who just finished a degree in biology from Duke University was doing research on ways to grow better tomato corps. In this research, she used CRISPER technology to modify about 100 tomato plants and they are all right now growing in a greenhouse on the Duke campus. It would be too long a post to go into the details of the specifics that are trying to modify, but if it works there will be a new strain of tomato plant that grows more efficiently in the future.
This CRISPER technology applied to improving crops will be the biggest improvement to yields by far.
Just because lab grown food can save biodiverse forestry doesn't mean that the forest footprintwill increase faster than its depletion.
11:07 lol 😂 news flash. Plants love nature and being in nature, not being indoors cooped up on the internet and Ai.
They should use light conduits for vertical farming.
Hey Ricky: Random question but i live in the Pacific Northwest and we have been seeing a lot more Dry, Hot weather. Which leads to more Fire's, droughts, low water levels. (Basically a compounding issue. Impacting the environment, humans, atmosphere, fire's releasing lots of added carbon, etc.) *So I'm asking: (is it possible to cover the hypothetical idea of seeing if we can add specific things to increase moisture/cloud formation/rain in the atmosphere and even maybe help absorb some amount of the increased heat, etc. That has been reeking havoc on our "used to be temperate rainforest ecosystem with old growth forest's and wetlands..?" I really think if we can increase or improve the drought situation here in the PNW that it could have a ton of positive benefits to all sorts of other things in the surrounding environment and neighboring environments, etc. Idk.) I just had to ask?? Idk if we even have any viable options we can attempt to utilize but i think we should try before things get any worse....