If legislators are concerned about farm jobs, this is short-sighted, as technology-driven productivity improvements are the basis for the prosperity we experience today.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/11/tech/monarch-autonomous-elect...
Or is cnn not what you mean by liberal media?
What else are they saying?
Doing more for less is just better. We should probably invent an economic system that doesn't kill people when efficiency improves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_compaction_(agriculture)#...
Of course different soils are different. You need to discuss the particulars of an individual field before you can make a judgement on what is best. But overall bigger is better.
You can gain some traction by going from tires to tracks, as some modern tractors do, but you still need a certain amount of weight or you're just going to spin when you're trying to pull a 30-foot-wide chisel plow through soil and last year's stalks.
Going fully autonomous might make tractors a little cheaper, if they don't need A/C and mirrors and things like that, but not lighter. And they'd still need the human stuff for occasions when it can't drive itself anyway, like moving it around the barn lot or going down the road to the next field.
I imagine it is at least twofold:
a) provide jobs for manual laborers
b) more of an equal playing field between large-scale industrial agriculture companies and "sole proprietor" farmers
EDIT: turns out to be a case of safety regulation written before more recent advances in tractor automation. So my guesses were wrong.
It's been in place since the 1970s. At the time it was passed, it was probably reasonable to require a human operator at the controls at all times.
The law is just an anachronism that the state legislature should remove/update.
I wonder how the law is written? Could you have a set of vehicular controls in Kenya remotely hooked up to control it? And then you only pay kenyan not US labour rates?
Can't imagine tractors move fast enough whilst plowing that the extra 67 milliseconds of latency matters.
If the automated tractor is remotely controlled by my smartphone (IANAF) in my pocket, does that count?
Source: autosteer on JD tractors let me get really good at switch games.
None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors. And I share in their concern about the meta-game here: the consolidation of capital, land, and power over the food supply.
Consumers already have a hard time having any lever against rising grocery costs. Consolidation earlier on in the supply chain is not helping.
Which is to say, automation in this space isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it can enable strange market dynamics (/imbalanced power dynamics) over food, which is objectively a bad thing.
He's got autosteer on a couple of pieces of equipment. His combine-harvester "only" cost $400,000 (used) compared to the $1M+ ones his neighbors use. As a fraction of $300,000, autosteer isn't particularly significant.
But it's massively useful. During a field operation, there are dozens of things the operator should be monitoring and adjusting in parallel. Pretty much all of these are automated with "idiot lights", but a good farmer is closely supervising. Less attention spent doing trivial things like steering results in more attention spend on deck levelling, rotor speed, pick-up speed, et cetera.
Who in the grocery supply chain is earning huge profit margins?
As far as I understand, consumers have long benefited from myriad subsidies provided to farmers, too low fossil fuel prices that do not price in externalities, too low water prices that deplete aquifers quicker than they can recharge, and extremely cheap labor due to cheaper labor in less developed countries and government looking the other way on farms that hire illegal immigrants.
If anything, the mechanization of farms is the only force pushing food prices lower. Before that, it was the advent of the Haber-Bosch process which drastically increased yields.
My father runs his own chopping business and his machines aren't automated or self-driven either. For him, it's all about being able to repair the machines himself. He's been a diesel mechanic and farm hand all his life, so if something breaks on a "traditional" harvester or tractor, he knows how to fix it and get it running again.
The internet and smartphones destroyed many categories of products and whole industries. AI is the latest cotton gin in spite of the hype because of capital's response to it with mass layoffs.
It's very hard and time-consuming to repeal/replace a law. It's at least 10x easier to make a "technical fix"/"clarification" that preserves the original intent while removing the unintended effects. That's what should be done.
So yeah, let's let giant farm tractors, larger and more dangerous than (non-firing) tanks from WWII, roam fields nationwide.
It also functions to ban unattended autonomous vehicles now that they do exist, and it may need to be adjusted to allow for an appropriate regulatory framework for limited and safe use of unattended autonomous vehicles, but that was not a subject of concern when it was written.
1. Prohibit large companies from using their size to negotiate prices, like how it used to be
2. Stop farm subsidies for all but the most critical areas. If you want to make food available to the poor, give them food stamp cards, but further restrict junk food. Supply side subsidies just create excess crops which lead to everyone trying to use cheap corn in some way. This cheap corn is then used to destroy local farmers in Latin America, further increasing illegal immigration and the power of cartels over a newly destitute population.
Example: corn burning furnaces.
