[HN Gopher] Scythe Works Without Borders
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Scythe Works Without Borders
Author : highway-trees
Score : 43 points
Date : 2024-10-27 05:13 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (scytheworks.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (scytheworks.ca)
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I mean it's an interesting idea, but it's weird to imagine that
| small time farmers in poor countries are capable of obtaining and
| using a sickle but are somehow not capable of obtaining and using
| a scythe.
|
| At least looking for ones here in the US, a decent quality sickle
| seems to run in the $30-$60 range while places that sell scythes
| seem to cost $100-$300, so I can't imagine it's some massive
| price barrier either
| burnte wrote:
| It's usually lack of knowledge/understanding and simple
| inertia, "this is how we've always done it."
| broken-kebab wrote:
| I'm afraid you just dismissed the question, not answered it.
| Plenty of things changed in agriculture in spite of simple
| inertia. Why does sickle-for-wheat-scythe-for-hay concept
| seem to prevail for different cultures in distant lands for
| so long?
| vdupras wrote:
| I'm not sure, but what I've read is that there's a loss of
| grain associated with using the scythe on wheat when it
| falls on the ground. Maybe it's a concern in some areas.
|
| But I think that with a proper apparel such as the one we
| see in the video on the website, the fall can be made
| gentler while still keeping the significant efficiency gain
| that the scythe offers over the sickle.
| crabbone wrote:
| Well, with a sickle you hold what you cut, and then you
| bind it together, so the grain doesn't fall on the ground.
| With a scythe you will have to somehow pick it up and
| organize in such a way that you can later collect it
| (without much dirt stuck to it etc.)
|
| NB. In high-school, I worked one summer cleaning and
| otherwise maintaining the local after-school building. It
| had a huge lawn behind it, which I had to trim with a
| scythe once every few weeks. So, I thought I knew how to do
| that reasonably well...
|
| And then, one day, some years later, me and few friends of
| mine went on a trip into the mountains, and we put our
| tent, as we later discovered, on some farmer's field. He
| got mad at us, and wanted us to cut the grass for him, as a
| form of compensation. Using a scythe on an incline, as
| opposed to flat surface is a... whole different story. I
| lodged it into the ground a few times, and then the farmer
| almost killed us :) In the end, we bought him some alcohol
| and left.
|
| So, the moral of the story: scythe might not be always the
| best tool, and in some situations it's far from obvious how
| to use it efficiently.
| haccount wrote:
| A high speed processor And lidar with digital blade angle
| control will probably make it work effortlessly on an
| incline too.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Taking inspiration from your nickname, how do you explain the
| many technical aspects of Japan that are still stuck in the
| 90s? They surely know how to look around and they surely know
| better things have been battle tested for decades in other
| countries, and yet...
| efm wrote:
| The Future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.
| William Gibson
|
| What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run
| it?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run
| it?
|
| There used to be an easy answer to this, now it's not
| politically or morally acceptable to support: colonization.
| Colonization is what brought modern farming practices (and
| their accompanying massive yields) as well as the development
| of the infrastructure needed to support it and other
| developments.
| r14c wrote:
| My guess is that's because people don't like being colonized.
| "Modern" industrial farming is also depleting the soil, so
| I'm not sure the jury is out on it actually being "better"
| than local practices.
| vdupras wrote:
| In terms of joules spent per blade of grass cut, a well honed
| scythe in the hands of a skillful operator is more efficient
| than mechanized solutions. If you have an area where you
| already have an abundance of agricultural workers, it might be
| that scythe is a better solution than having your agriculture
| sector being dependent on fossil fuels.
| troupo wrote:
| "If you already have a bunch of people doing back-breaking
| labor, do not even think about giving them efficient
| machines"
| vdupras wrote:
| Working in the field is difficult, yes, but the western
| world still hasn't figured out an answer to the question
| "what happens when we run out of dead dinosaurs[1] to
| eat?". Until it has, any idea to not exacerbate the problem
| until we figure it out is, in my mind, a good idea.
|
| [1]: fossil fuels, with poetic license
| Syonyk wrote:
| "Efficient" in terms of what outputs, for what inputs?
|
| You can't just handwave the term as a synonym for "I think
| it's better!" - it actually does imply inputs, outputs, and
| depending on what you want to optimize for, you may get
| very different results.
|
| If a scythe is genuinely better for the job than a sickle,
| great!
|
| But in a country without a lot of infrastructure and
| without modern supply chains, I'm pretty sure a tractor is
| the wrong solution to the problem. Unless, of course, your
| problem is "how to burden nations with loans they will
| never be able to pay back so you can come in and take
| over."
| xupybd wrote:
| You have to incrementally improve. You can't jump an
| economic step.
|
| I'd love to have everyone have no labour to do and be
| served by robots but let them eat cake doesn't work in
| reality.
| toast0 wrote:
| You can absolutely jump economic steps. Many countries
| never got wide deployment of wired telephones, and never
| will. They skipped right to wide deployment of mobile
| phones. Many of those same countries skipped right past
| desktop computers in every home and laptops to replace
| desktops and have gone straight from limited computer
| access to the mobile phone replaces desktop computers.
|
| You certainly don't need to hit _all_ the economic steps,
| but using capital to reduce labor doesn 't make sense
| when labor is much less expensive than capital.
| xupybd wrote:
| By economic steps I meant you have to generate enough
| capital to afford tractors. This is a good stepping
| stone.
| Syonyk wrote:
| The skill tree depends on awful lot on what you care about, and
| don't assume that western "high tech" solutions are the best,
| because they're the most complicated.
|
| From a "Built out of locally available resources, with minimum
| energy, and robust repairability," it's hard to beat a scythe
| or other similar tool.
|
| And I guarantee a well built scythe will still work, if
| tolerably cared for, long past the last of our over-complicated
| tractors rusting in fields because the right software to update
| the firmware to allow you to start the engine after changing
| the oil was trying to talk to some server that no longer
| exists...
|
| Unless you're making this argument. I can't actually tell which
| way you're arguing for.
| dtquad wrote:
| Insane that a country that hasn't invented the scythe yet has
| also produced one of the authors of the "Attention is all you
| need" paper.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > regions where sickles (or machetes) are traditionally used
|
| I don't understand how it's possible that there are regions that
| don't use scythes (for crops that warrant them), when scythes
| have been around for over a thousand years?
|
| I would venture to say that if they haven't transitioned yet it's
| because they don't want to (for whatever reasons--no idea what
| those might be).
| traverseda wrote:
| Guesses at some reasons
|
| * Scythes need to be sharp, a machete will work even when
| poorly maintained.
|
| * Machetes are cheaper to make.
|
| * Machetes are easier to use
|
| * Scythes are a specialized tool, where as I can buy a machete
| for ten dollars at Canadian Tire. Economics of scale are
| different.
|
| > There are still several remaining scythe factories in the
| world. In recent years a competitive, market-driven economy is
| making it difficult for scythe making factories to retain the
| quality level that was once a standard.
|
| https://scytheworks.ca/swwobs-blade-choice/
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Invention and adoption of technology, even "basic" technology,
| is very contingent on circumstance. Bows are pretty near
| universal (but not quite), but specific improvements like
| recurved limbs are patchy. And people aren't exactly quick to
| adopt new farming techniques when a failure could mean they
| starve. I guess that's also why this organization is pushing
| uphill. But I think it's very possible that lots of people
| haven't heard of or seriously evaluated a scythe.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| A good scythe is faster then a weed-wacker but slower then a
| lawnmower. I have been using a scythe to cut my lawn for a few
| years now. It works, and is fun, but you must keep it VERY sharp.
| If the scythe is not razor sharp it will simply push the grass
| over instead of cutting it. A sickle will still work when
| somewhat dull, because it gathers the grass into the concave bit
| and/or you can hold on the grass with one hand and cut it with
| the other.
|
| A scythe you have to sharpen every 5-10 min or so, normally you
| keep a scythe stone in your pocket to do this. The sickle you can
| just sharpen at the beginning of the day and that will be good
| enough.
|
| The sharpening process takes some practice to get good at,
| particularly if you start peening it as well.
|
| https://scytheworks.ca/knowledge-base/chapter-4-preparing-th...
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