We can perform agriculture without fossil fuels

In My Humble Opinion
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I started a thread on a similar topic, Replacing Heavy Machinery With Robots, which went pretty much nowhere. I was thinking of replacing the agricultural machines we use today with electric ones on the same scale. When I realized the kind of agility possible with walking robots, an answer to corporate-scale agriculture without fossil fuels presented itself to my mind- humongous waking robot platforms! But the overall concept is actually a little too sci-fi for 2014.

But there isn’t any reason why agriculture has to be done with the same scale of machinery, especially if we understand that it is important to scrub the carbon emissions out of the process. An option that doesn’t seem far-out at all would be an electric version of something like this. I’m talking about just the front tractor portion- the idea is for this one ev to be the basis for most mechanized work on our carbon-free farm, and perform various farm functions via attachable enhancements. Want to bale hay? You can see what that looks like in the picture I cited. Time to harvest? Attach harvesting hardware. Each vehicle does less work per hour compared to the gasoline-powered mega-machines used today for the obvious reason that it is smaller, which means that we utilize 4 or 8 of them on a large farms and hire guys to operate them. Maybe the price of food goes up. Guess what? The price of food is going up if we stick with fossil fuels, too. Might as well force a silver lining onto the phenomenon.

A tractor is built to tow things, so some system of detachable/replaceable batteries seems possible. These days I tend to use the Tesla Model S battery as a unit. I don’t see any reason why our electric tractor couldn’t accommodate a battery at least the size of the Model S. If an additional, detachable tow-battery were also on this scale, together with the tractor might be able to work for… I don’t know. 5 hours? 100 miles? At this point I haven’t done detailed math into the power requirements or the MPG of conventional tractors.

Being limited by its less-convenient power source, it may have to stop a few times a day to hook up with a new battery hitch, several of which just happen to be laying around for this very purpose on our carbon-free farm. If we’re really to be carbon-free, we might as well generate (some of) our power on-site via solar panels. After all, it is a farm, why not use some of the land for fuel? 1 km[sup]2[/sup] (that is a million square meters) of 20% efficient solar panels at 1000w of solar irradiance, assuming 5 hours of daylight, will generate 1 Mwh of power per day. Ground solar installations can be raised onto the roofs of structures as we devise uses for those spaces. All this pairs very well with wind turbines if you have the wind resources.

That ought to be enough to power farm operations. Since we are going to have all these large batteries hanging around the vicinity of large solar and wind installations, it seems a natural move to coordinate this system with the grid. Certain times of the year there won’t be a lot of activity, and those batteries could be used for peak-shaving, grid storage, and all-around fossil-fuel displacing. Maybe some times of the year our farm needs a boost from the grid to keep all of this equipment running Government regulations could ensure that the big utilities profit from this arrangement instead of being destroyed by the advent of massive-scale aggregate solar. We’re still going to need the grid, and therefore the utilities, it is just the coal and gas consumption we’ll want to do away with-maybe it won’t be quite 100%; I think 80%-90% would be good enough. Ex.: could we still have propane tanks? Yeah, I think so. Ideally people will transfer from one kind of work (coal and gas activity) to the other; in reality I think a lot of people are going to be angry until they get used to it.

Anyway, in summary, our farms are logical places to convert into solar generation and grid-storage sites. (Possibly government subsidized and developed) electric farm equipment would capitalize on its proximity to this electric infrastructure and perform agricultural operations without gasoline or natural gas. Things like pumping water would be done with solar water pumps which are compatible with the above-mentioned tow-batteries for times when you really want to pump a lot of water. There has to be a way to make a flatbet dump truck ev work. Literally every use of fossil fuels on the farm can be replaced with equipment that runs on electricity- it is just going to take a lot of doing. Plus, I’m mostly pulling this out of my ass- I think people who know more about both farming and electric vehicles have probably thought this through better than I can. So, what is the best way?

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For pumping water wind will be the best technology, it’s been used for that for a long time already. The problem with cutting fossil fuel usage in farming equipment and construction is that they aren’t the biggest consumers of fossil fuels.

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The highest fossil fuel usage is for production of nitrated fertilizer.

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Sure, most US oil usage is for transportation, and most of that is for light vehicles. I want to clean up the farm; and besides, green energy produced there can power light vehicles in the city.

Maybe wind is the best method for pumping water, though electric pumps run from diesel generators are already in use, so with all these batteries laying around I thought what the heck.

How do we produce nitrate fertilizer without fossil fuels? Giant coops to generate bird poop?

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We could fashion the space under the solar panels into caves to attract bats, which will eat the insects in the fields and will excrete tons of guano to use as fertilizer.

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It’s being done. In fact, GE tried making an electric “tractor” (actually it was more like a riding lawn mower) more than 40 years ago and there are othersstill doing it. Notice from the video that the battery pack looks like it weighs more than the tractor.

Looks like the big problem is still scalability – getting a battery pack practical enough to power the big field equipment and cost-effective enough to invest in.

This article seems to say that John Deere Europe introduced an electric-generating tractor, to power pull-behind equipment like planters and sprayers, in 2008. But I can’t find anything that indicates it was a successful innovation or that anyone else has picked up on it.

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The OP is very generous with other people’s money. Who is going to pay for all of this new equipment to replace existing equipment? Who is going to pay for all of these extra workers to operate the more numerous smaller machines? Who is going to pay for all of those solar panels and the equipment needed to tie them in to the grid?

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Where are you going to get the copper to connect and run all these electric motors?

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I have an alternate variant on this idea. Instead of batteries (big, expensive, and they decay over time so they also “burn” up, costing more than fuel in many cases), wire the tractor directly.

The electric grid would supply the power, with the energy sourced from wind/solar/nuclear over the long term.

Well, how would you plug in the moving tractor? A permanent grid of wires over the farm, similar to the network used by electric streetcars, would cost a fortune. Agricultural land doesn’t produce enough value to justify the costs of needing so many wires.

So it occurred to me that you could use a several mile long extension “cord”(well, more like a heavy cable, you’d have to use high voltages and really thick, heavy duty wire). Electric robot vehicles would travel in front of the tractor, carrying the cord. The cord would go from the front of the tractor, to the series of robot vehicles. Each robot vehicle would be about the size of a small SUV, with offroad tires, and would have onboard 2 reels of cord, each able to be wound and unwound on demand.

Sophisticated sensors and software would act to manage the cord tension and position. The tractor itself would also need to be computer guided, in order for it to be part of the control loop. (it would automatically vary speed, for instance, to let the robot cord carrying vehicles catch up if they run into a snag)

All this equipment could be reused on many fields, so in principle it would be cheaper than permanent electric wiring.

Of course, at this level of complexity, batteries might be cheaper still…

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R. Goldberg, is that you?

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Well, ok. I see what you mean, Musicat. Umm, maybe just a big pole sticking out the top of the tractor and a giant electrical cable. The cable would be suspended on poles and only descend to the earth behind the tractor’s tools. A truck would be parked at the end of the field with the reel onboard. You’d move the truck over one “lane” after the tractor completes each strip.

It could be a robot truck, but anyways, it greatly simplifies thing.

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I don’t know OP. You seem to think that electricity is free. I’m sure that the way it’s being done today, with the level of tech we have is the most efficient and cost effective.

Also, farmers need machines that can run 10-12 hours with out any downtime. Electrics simply are not there yet.

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Well, the Haber process will work with any source of hydrogen, so it seems that a lot of work is being done to produce hydrogen via electrolysis from sustainable energy.

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Overall, everybody who eats. But in the end, looks like we’ll have to raise taxes on the wealthy. I’m afraid capitalism isn’t up to the task of eliminating carbon emissions. Maintaining .0001% of the population as billionaires simply isn’t as high a priority, so that is what will have to give, sorry. I’m still not a communist though, I just think we need to look at our priorities and realize that absolute market freedom simply isn’t the highest good.

I don’t think electricity is free. Carbon emissions actually aren’t free- if we did the accounting for them, I think we’d find that our current system is not cost effective after all.

The way we do things now, yes, equipment runs 10-12 hours a day. But the notion that we have to do things in exactly the same way was what led me down the rabbit hole of giant walking robots on my first stab at these issues. The way we do things will have to change. We can’t continue to do industrial-scale agriculture for the profit of a handful of people, for one. All that system ends up doing is externalizing the costs, and we end up with a bunch of fat asthmatics subsisting on a diet of corn syrup.

A tractor that runs for 4 hours at a time and pulls over to hitch up a new battery can work now. It is a little more effort, but frankly the notion that using fossil fuels is effortless is kind of an illusion- who is going to breathe all those fumes from fracking the oil for the gasoline, and where will the people move when fracking destroys their water supplies? What will we do when fuel costs $8-$10 an hour and we don’t have plans for alternative ways of doing things?

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Electricity production is a leading contributor of carbon emissions.

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Bolding mine.

Fracking is the process of inducing fractures in a low-porosity reservoir rock to enhance production. It has nothing to do with extracting gasoline from oil. You may be confusing this process with the fractionating towers used in refinery processes.

Also, the fracking process, done properly, is little more likely to damage ground water supplies that conventional oil or gas drilling. If a well is cased and cemented according to well-known and mostly legally-enforced standards, there can be no communication between the fractured zones and the near-surface formations containing ground water.

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That is a good industry ad, but the fact is that NOAA is reporting 5 times the emissions around the vicinity of fracking sites in Colorado compared to what the industry self-reports.

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Pétron et al do not claim these emissions are due to fracturing rock a mile underground. Because they aren’t.

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This thread is a perfect example of people getting a small amount of mis-information and using their “jump to conclusions mat” to come up with a bunch of wild needless theories that are the opposite of what this site was intended for…ignorance is being created by this thread.

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You really haven’t thought this through, have you? Farms are private entities. Farmers have enormous investments in farm equipment–millions of dollars worth of tractors, combines, etc. They can’t simply discard that equipment and buy all this new stuff.