On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 2:14 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
The people picking crops wear haz mat suits and ride on electric cars that > rise up to the high end of the vines. A robot train of picked crops threads > its way to the processing building. Pretty soon I expect robots will also > pick the crops. > I like the high-tech approach to agriculture, but the hazmat suites and the water sterilization seem a little anachronistic -- like a 1960s take on what the future will be like. The view here in California looks a little different, with the farmers' markets and the locavore movement -- people are wanting food to be less high-tech rather than more high tech. My guess is that this is where the future is. There will be increasing market demand around the world for food grown the old-fashioned way -- organic, without large fertilizer inputs and tractors and so on. People will want cheese produced on a farm nearby rather than shipped across the country and loaded with preservatives to keep it from going bad. They will want strange, long-forgotten cultivars rather than the stock iceberg and romain lettuce and the abnormally large and pale tomatos that you seen in the chain supermarkets. This is not to say that high-tech has no place; just that the haz-mat suites and the water sterilization seem a little out of tune with where things are heading, if I had my guess. Eric
