[HN Gopher] Supply chain resilience is a requirement for agritec...
___________________________________________________________________
Supply chain resilience is a requirement for agritech hardware
Author : ideadibia
Score : 39 points
Date : 2022-08-30 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hardwarethings.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hardwarethings.org)
| conorcleary wrote:
| I often refer back to Open Source Ecology when agricultural
| hardware is brought up:
| https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/gvcs-machine-index/
| claudiulodro wrote:
| I'm all for improving the success of local agricultural efforts,
| and the 2.5-acre farms held by many people in the article seems
| like an improvement over the gigantic thousand-acre ones here in
| terms of sustainability, but it's hard for me to generalize how
| something like small scale thresher manufacturing would work in
| America. The average commercial farm in the US is a much larger
| operation and has millions of dollars of very high-tech machinery
| from my understanding.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Why would you need to?
|
| Western agriculture as you point out is very different to
| somewhere like in the article.
|
| You fit the product to the market not the market to the
| product.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| We definitely still need very large farms with big machines
| to feed the world; but nowadays, with climate problems,
| droughts, smaller and diverse farms resist better, are more
| productive by surface, have a better quality of soil, better
| quality of food, they are literally carbon sinks, it just
| requires more manual work
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > it just requires more manual work
|
| Oh, is that all :-)
| zdragnar wrote:
| A 2.5 acre farm in the US is a hobby farm. You might get a bit
| of income from canning or selling exotic meat, but I cannot
| imagine 2.5 acres of anything being enough for a basic income
| to cover land taxes, equipment, and basic essentials for the
| family.
| haveaniceday wrote:
| If you have a scroll through the episodes of Country Calendar
| (https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/country-calendar) you'll find
| examples of small farms definitely produce enough to make a
| good living.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Maybe in NZ, but some of those crops would be illegal here
| (mussels in particular are a protected species, and farming
| either native or non-native species would be extremely
| illegal), and the others are really commonplace. Apples,
| flowers, cows, we've got it all but kiwi and sheep, and
| there's not really much of a market for either.
| EddySchauHai wrote:
| Yeah you are right. One of the most profitable crops is
| cherry tomatoes and you can make $1400 per acre on a good
| year, $900 on average. Saffron, with optimal yields at the
| most expensive prices per lb, will get you $125k from 2.5
| acres.
|
| My dream is to have a farm with enough crops to cover my food
| & maybe sell a little extra. Out of interest does anyone know
| a good place in Europe where that's possible for a good
| price?
| vcanhoto wrote:
| Land prices in Portugal (away from the coast and from
| bigger cities) are pretty cheap for western European
| standards. It's getting noticed though - a quick YouTube
| search will show you plenty of examples of expats jumping
| on the opportunity.
|
| IMO making a profit would be the hard part - the internal
| market is small and in general produce prices are low.
| Infernal wrote:
| I am curious, but surely the $900-$1400 an acre is based on
| rows configured for tractor-based tilling/plowing,
| fertilizing, herbicide etc.? As I understand it, the nice
| thing about a smallholding is that you don't have to
| mechanize near as aggressively, and therefore can plant
| much more densely than a tractor-based farm would.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Except for market garden operations, which can produce a
| decent quantity of garden vegetables out of an acre or two.
| You could probably get $20k, $30k.
|
| But labour costs and capital costs are very high. It's not a
| really profitable operation. Labour of love really.
|
| Most organic market garden type places are only a couple
| acres.
|
| 2.5 of premium wine grapes with on-site winery could also be
| profitable except around here and in most places regulations
| explicitly forbid wineries that have acreage that small.
| Around here it's a 5 acre minimum and then most townships
| have much more stringent regulations on top of that yet.
|
| In general anything "value added" (jams, wines, bread,
| butchered/prepared meat, whatever) can be used to turn a a
| pure small "farm" into a more profitable operation. But
| again, costs.
|
| (I have a 6 acre property, with about a 3/4 acre of grapes
| for my own use).
| nyokodo wrote:
| > 2.5-acre farms held by many people in the article seems like
| an improvement over the gigantic thousand-acre ones here in
| terms of sustainability
|
| Smaller farms -may- have less vast monoculture sustainability
| issues. However, how do the 2.5 acre farms achieve the
| efficiencies that scale affords the massive farms in terms of
| water, energy, and fertilizer use?
| claudiulodro wrote:
| Something like the Vietnamese VAC (garden/pond/livestock)
| system[1] is the ideal in terms of efficiency and complete
| nutrition in my opinion:
|
| > In many villages, 50-80 percent of families have the full
| VAC system. Figures show that 30-60 percent of income of most
| village families may come from the system; in many cases, it
| may be 100 percent.
|
| > The pond is constructed close to the house so that the
| domestic and kitchen wastes are drained into the fishpond.
| The livestock pens and garden are also situated near the
| pond. The 1000-5000 m2 garden includes a variety of
| vegetables (i.e. green onion, sweet potato, watercress, etc.)
| and fruits (i.e. banana, orange, peach, apricot, etc.) and
| other crops, including sugarcane, tea and cassava. This
| provides a mix of perennial and annual crops.
|
| This is all on generally less than an acre (1 acre = 4000
| square meters)! Fish, crops, and livestock in one self-
| contained system.
|
| [1] https://www.fao.org/3/y1187e/y1187e10.htm
| soperj wrote:
| Where do the fish come from in these systems when they
| drain the ponds annually?
| rascul wrote:
| Are there pictures of this? I can't seem to find any. I'm
| on an an acre and would love to see how others use a
| similar sized portion of land to do such a thing. I might
| get some ideas.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-30 23:01 UTC)