Fiber optic cables reveal a serious problem at the heart of modern farming

17 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by Brajeshwar
(grist.org)

8 Comments

altairprime

2 hours ago

Given the discovered ability of fiberoptics to sense water content, a kind of fiber fabric could be deployed to sense water levels across an entire field at the cubic yard level. The sensing controller would end up resembling an LCD addressing controller in reverse, with row/column/subpixel (sub-terranean-pixels!) breakout. Not that pixel-addressed farm fields are going to be efficient to work yet, lacking both processes and tooling for soil, seed, and harvest — but with sensing- and tool-assisted farming, we ought to be more able to harness the soul that we have without destroying it with the sledgehammer-nail “till the whole field” approach.

contingencies

an hour ago

Precision weeding is a thing. Some do it with poison, some do it with picking, some do it spraying hot oil, others do it spraying hot water. Any way you do it, it basically removes the weeding argument for tilling soil... but only if the weeds are small. If the weeds are large (think aggressive rhizomes or grasses) it wont be effective.

Other arguments for tilling exist: aeration, mixing-in of new organic content/fertilizer (not really necessary: green waste can just be dumped at surface level in many cases, and this is already becoming more common in mass-agriculture with 'cover crops'), furrow-creation for seed planting, etc.

Fundamentally, leaving a field uncovered for any length of time is bad and destroys the soil more than if you'd just let it grow weeds or a temporary crop for awhile then culled that as in-place fertilizer for a next crop.

A few months ago some friends of mine visited Australia from overseas and I took them to one of the older wineries in the area. The winery manages something like 10-20 major fields. They brought in a new viticulturalist to manage the fields and the first thing he did was introduce cover crops. In the tasting, they brought out soil cores from before and after the changes, which had only been in place for two years. The difference was tremendous. The old methods, unquestioned for decades, left the soil dry, poor, and largely infertile. The new methods restored organic matter, moisture retention, and a significant sub-surface biome.

monkaiju

4 hours ago

I realize this exact data might be novel, but haven't we know that till-reliant farming was detrimental to soil for a long time? The no-till people are a huge part of the permaculture movement, also theres always folks talking about how important fungal networks are and how they're largely destroyed by tilling.

I mean even Karl Marx talked a ton about soil health and while he mostly talked about "metabolic rift" not tilling (that I know about) specifically it seems like a similar focus on short term output vs long term soil health.

I guess I'm just not clear on if there is actually a new serious problem being "revealed" as the title says or just being substantiated further.

R_D_Olivaw

3 hours ago

Agreed. This hardly seems like novel information. The method at which he arrived at it is neat though, fwiw.

At the very least it adds a new vector to the position. I was also unaware of how receptive to disruption fiber optic cables were. So, at least I learned that.

idontwantthis

3 hours ago

If no till is better and tilling is work, why do farmers till? Why not do less work and have a better result?

altairprime

2 hours ago

Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like “tracking the soil’s water retention levels”, “planting cover crops or even giving a field a year off”, and other such steps that in general can be summarized as “cost centers”.

Given the economic climate, few non-corporate farmers can afford that investment without the collapse of their farm, and few corporate farmers (none at nationwide scale, afaik) are willing to invest in cost centers that threaten to decrease, rather than increase, their rate of profit growth year-over-year. One could absolutely make a case that regulatory investment in such things be imposed upon megacorp farms first, with their processes and technology made available by subsidy to smaller farms; it would be enough to structure the subsidy as inversely proportional to the acreage reaped for value, with some language ensuring that the cost of investment into land farmed by contract to a megacorp is paid to the land operator. To prevent certain abuses, they’d also have to modify farming contract law to make maintaining long-term use of the land an inalienable right, so that unsustainable output-quota farming contracts are unenforceable.

This is an unlikely outcome in the U.S., but I still appreciate the researches providing more evidence in support of it.

Zanfa

2 hours ago

In short term profits vs long term benefits, we all know who wins.