That’s what my guy at Cargill is for!
Imagine being this condescending to professionals in a highly complicated field. Farmers know this shit, hell they helped invent it you fucking prick.
Don’t kid yourself, there is still an assload of convention tillage and monocropping going on, at least in my neck of the woods.
I’ve surveyed large swaths of agricultural land; hundreds of inspection points, and the B horizon has been completely lost due to annual tillage. In one case I had two pits 200 m away from each other. One was in the field and one was in a stand of trees they didn’t clear. The field profile had maybe 15 cm of A horizon with no structure over a calcareous C. The bush profile had 50 cm of well structured A horizon, and another 20 cm of B overtop of the same calcareous C. It was beautiful.
In another field, a guy was moldboarding… This is just one of the surveys I’ve been on.
There’s a lot of guys out there who know what they are doing, and they do it well, but at least in my opinion, regenerative Ag needs to catch on more. From my perspective, there seems to be resistance, though, and I’m not sure if it’s from economics, generational practices, or a combination of factors.
Yeah I know this is just an AI generated meme, but people who look like this are actually pretty solar punk, in my experience. I first heard of fracking radishes from a 70 year old farmer, 15 years ago. This meme just promotes culture war bullshit.
Fracking radishes
Wut?
I saw it and just moved on because I was going to get pissed off arguing with assholes that have never seen a tractor first hand.
We put hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of land into legume fallow and cover crops in order to increase fertility. We plan for weeks ahead of every planting season to understand soil tests and come up with strategies that get a crop off and built organic matter. We spend hundreds of thousands on equipment to reduce tillage and encourage soil biomes.
But I guess we’re still stupid fucking assholes to everyone. Kinda gotten used to the hate.
Actually even small-time farmers today are more sophisticated than you might think. At my last software job, at a relatively small agro company, I learned that any piece of farm equipment newer than 25 or 30 years has a controller that can run it - say like varying the amount of water, fertilizer, pesticide etc that gets applied to basically every square meter of a field. They take samples and develop computer maps showing the levels of moisture, nitrogen, phosphorous, etc. Then software creates programs for the equipment, to tailor what happens at every spot. I was surprised by how technical modern farming is. A lot of the equipment drives itself around, there’s just a human sitting in the cab in case something goes wrong. But of course all this tech increases their costs and they still struggle to make a profit.
As long as that sophistication is geared towards reaching capitalist targets, all it does is enable them to ruin the land through “tragedies of the commons” faster.
Whether that’s desertification because you’re pumping up more groundwater than rain can replenish, nitrates continuing to exist after they leave your land, pesticides giving your customers cancer, insecticides causing a collapse of pollinator populations you rely on for crop yields, crop pandemics due to a lack of genetic diversity, or something else, modern capitalist farmers have a lot of fancy tools for destroying the planet and leaving society vulnerable to starvation.
Legit farmers are often highly knowledgeable in their field (pun intended).
Especially now with the crazy tech being put into harvesting equipment. These guys can basically field strip a near fully autonomous combine harvester and put it back together with little more than a socket set and good ol’ grit. Not to mention they are definitely doing soil testing all the time and 100% know what should be planted where and when to maintain soil health.
I watched a piece about machine vision being used to identify pests that harvesting equipment then shoots with lasers rather than just full coverage pesticide spraying. These folks are honestly near the leading edge of some wild tech, because they are actually putting it to clear, effective, use rather than generating 13.5 fingered images of their favorite cartoon character in the nude like so many other AI enjoyers.
I had a software dev job at a small agro company about 10 years ago, where I learned that modern harvesters weigh what they harvest and record the location before sweeping it into a hopper. From this data they produce a yield map that helps them decide how to adjust how they program their machines next year, in terms of seed spacing, watering, and applying various products to maximize the yield in each spot. I mentioned lasering bugs as a joke and they said that was either real or coming soon.
Honestly, they already know – most farmers these days have college degrees in soil science or agribusiness or horticulture or whatever. After all, most farms are owned by Big Ag and they’ve presumably got the same “we just immediately shred your resume if you don’t have at least a bachelor’s, whether the job actually needs it or not” applicant gatekeeping standards as the rest of corporate America.
If they’re not doing the sustainable thing it’s not because they’re ignorant, it’s because it’s less profitable than the unsustainable thing and they’re choosing the shortsighted option on purpose.
In 2019, a guy at my work told me that his cousin, who was significantly more rural than him, was working on plotting all his fields with drones so he could could largely automate harvesting as well as engage in targeted fertilizing, pesticide and herbicide application. Same person also apparently was running a (legal) grow operation out of a big barn that they were trying to make carbon neutral with on-site renewables.
Folks in ‘rural’ trades can be very high tech if they know how it’ll make them money.
This mostly depends on the farm size. How rural the area is isn’t that much important in terms of how high tech a farm is.
An ag class is where is finally understood what the quadratic equation was for.
I, a soil scientist, had to take linear algebra, stats, and calculus. Only stats was applicable.
A large reason for that is that corporate farms have won out over family farms. The family farms that are still standing have taken similar approaches and there’s been a lot more effort invested in actually learning the science and business as you point out. 30 years ago it was a much different story.
corporate farms have won out over family farms
Huh. TIL. Thanks for the share
^ Excellent comment.
So more reason to hate farmers doing the wrong thing?
Uh, they’re not? It’s a very thin line between profit and bankruptcy. These men and women know what they’re doing.
I don’t understand. What’s the message behind the meme?
This is AI right, I think I saw this image before in an AI subreddit
Yes it’s confirmed AI but dropping pic quality so no one can tell
Looks like it to me. Something weird is going on with the red shirt’s waistline and where are his arms? Plus the shadows are too harsh for an overcast sky.
Watched an explanation of AI generated images and they pointed out that since the images start with a seed of black and white noise, they (almost) always come out with an even mix of light and dark areas.
Once you see it, AI images are much easier to spot.
Oh, so that’s why the lighting is always cartoonish.
What do you mean all this nitrogen I’m putting down is burning my crops? I been doing it the same way for thirty-odds years.
dumb city folk don’t know what they talk about
Dumb city folk think farmers don’t understand science.
Without looking it up, what’s silage, what’s it for, how does it work. Go.
You fool, I’ve been playing farming simulator for the past month
Silage is fermenting crops under an oxygen deficiency(this is crucial to stop the crops from rotting) to preserve the gras. Its basically an upscaled version of making sauerkraut.
Easy as that.
But yeah, this devinetively isn’t something everyone knows and also most people will never need this in their lives.
Cool challenge
Anaerobically fermented grass, it’s cattle feed for the winter, it ferments under covers without (much) air getting to it, that way it also doesn’t rot.
I think. But I’m a network engineer so that could be wrong. It’s just what I think I heard in some random source I don’t remember.
A lot of that knowledge is passed on between generations, and was trial and error, rather than formal training.
Another name for “trial and error” is “experimentation”. And another word for “training” is “doing”.
I don’t think that at all. My family has had farms for the last four generations. The nitrogen thing is something I’ve actually heard, and it’s a great quote for memeing.
…or they just saw a minority. Similar look!
This is WAY more likely in my experience, they know all about cover crops and that’s about it.
The extension life
Unless the crops are barley and hops I can’t see you getting much focus from that bunch
This here soil is as fer-tile as my cousin wife’s baby maker and no city slicken, fancy pant scientist is gunna tell me different, ya hear!
