The reason equipment has to run 10-12 hours a day is because there are only X days per year where the crop and conditions are right to do what has to be done. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about 2,000 acres of corn or a patch of tomatoes in your garden. You need to plant them at the earliest stage in the growing season (but not too early!), harvest them when they’re ready (but definitely before they start to rot!), fertilize them at the proper stage of growth and work on the weeds and the bugs on the critters’ schedule, not yours. The same is true for animal agriculture. Cows need to be milked when cows need to be milked, and breeding needs to be done and the animal’s schedule, not yours.
And let’s face it. If you’re trying to produce at least 2,000 calories per day for 7 billion people, there’s going to be industrial-scale agriculture involved.
Well to hijack slightly: Many of these heavy vehicles use diesel and those engines are fairly easily converted to vegetable oil burning. What kind of acreage would one need to produce the required fuel for a big farm (it’s my understanding that rapeseed oil is the preferred one in Europe)? I am not sure emissions from SVO (straight vegetable oil) are that much better but from a sustainability and energy security viewpoint it could be worth the effort.
It’s not unreasonable. You can get about 35-40 gallons of oil per acre from soybeans and cotton. I’m not sure how that converts to fuel, but assuming you get 75% of petroleum’s energy, that’s enough to work 4 or 5 acres per season. You’ll have to put a high-volume press and tanks on every farm, find a use for what’s left of the crop after you squeeze out the oil, and probably treat the oil somewhat to store it, but the big question is economics. Whole soybeans are getting about $14.50-$15.00 per bushel; roughly $600 per acre. Forty gallons of “off-road” diesel fuel costs less than $150.
TLDR: It’s possible, but a farmer gets more for selling the crop than it costs to buy the fuel that goes into the crop.
We can always use Haber’s process to extract nitrogen from the air on renewable power. We really don’t have to use petroleum for this, even if you don’t want to resort to being a part-time guano farmer.
Returning to this, I want to point out that I can sense the political right in your post. I am certainly not aligned with the right these days- on the leadership level, I think they’ve gone nuts- but I can’t say that I really identify as a ‘leftist’ either. With that in mind, take a look at this awesome article on the subject of the collision between the consequences of climate science and capitalism as we know it and the political right’s identity. Don’t read it in my voice- again, I’m not really the guy who is looking for an excuse to ‘promote the leftist agenda’ broadly.
But if you haven’t guessed, climate change is the reason why I’m interested in taking the carbon out of agriculture. You’re a righty, Oak, so I’d be interested in your opinion of what that author has to say.
Mostly from Mexico and Australia, in all likelihood. If the gist of the Replacing Industrial Machinery With Robots thread didn’t tip you off, you’ll have to wait for a future We Can Mine Copper Without Fossil Fuels thread.
This is one area where giant walking robots might actually be applicable
Over the distances involved on a farm, maybe it would be more efficient to use very large ev farm equipment with modest batteries, use stationary flow batteries to store your renewable power, and beam the power via microwave to your machinery. The coordination of that would be kind of robot-ish.
Yes, today. But for one, the dramatically greater efficiency of electric motors over ICE engines means that emissions for evs are lower even if the power is produced via fossil fuels. But besides that, we’re going to have to stop generating electricity with fossil fuels. Atmospheric CO2 is becoming simply unacceptable. We have to face it and we have to deal with it.
The mechanism is already in place- the Renewable Energy Standards. You know- this state has to have 20% of its energy produced by renewables by 2020. The EPA has the mandate to enforce the Clean Air Act wrt to carbon emissions. So, over time, the RES is going to have to be cranked up to about 75%-90%. We’ll run our electric farm equipment off of that, and if it isn’t completely carbon-free, it will at least not be so unacceptably polluting. In any case, our fossil-free farm is intended to be a net renewable energy exporter.
No, I meant, “who will breathe all the fumes released by the fracking process?” It isn’t like this is going on behind some kind of curtain; we can see you from space.
We can’t find a worse example of cowboy recklessness without bringing up BP. In North Dakota, there aren’t so many people to fall ill, unlike in, say, Texas, where fumes from fracking are making people sick.
Besides this, it is exposed that natural gas really isn’t so carbon-friendly a fuel once you take the absurd production process into account. I don’t think natural gas is going to go away, but I am afraid we are going to have to destroy 75%-90% of the demand for it worldwide by replacing it with not just wind and solar, but all renewables, possibly including nuclear power.
But emissions from electricity generation won’t do it. We have to destroy global demand for oil as well. I think we have the answer for light transportation already- 100mpg plug-in hybrids are already available and ought to get cheap enough in the future. But we have to go after OTR trucking, and shipping, agriculture, mining, and so on to really tamp down carbon emissions to an acceptable level.
So, this isn’t a thread about the merits or demerits of fracking. How would you improve my fossil-free farming scheme?
I know farms are private entities. Mostly it is only corporate people who are going to get hurt, to the benefit of real people. I don’t intend to turn the whole world upside-down, or eliminate capitalism or private property or what-have-you. We just have to get the carbon emissions out of our processes, painful as that will be. It isn’t an attack on the right from the left- I don’t approach it as a political issue.
The transition would take decades to implement, as would the transition to fossil-free energy. If you’re really worried about undoing the Reagan tax cuts, what government assistance would be required could be paid for out of the military budget instead. After all, climate change is a real threat, capable of disrupting the welfare of the American people, unlike the imaginary ones we’re paying to preparing to fight with tanks generals don’t want. Cut those and put the money into electric tractor development. We aren’t really going to need 2000+ F-35s- that is just a way for politicians to spend money. I honestly think we could eliminate an entire carrier group without incurring any additional military risk. So have Congress appropriate all that for a worthwhile purpose instead.
As for the old instruments, it might make sense to have some central locations where they can be collected and either modified or melted down for raw materials to build new ones. We could melt down the unwanted tanks at the same time, build a whole new fleet. But the more it is done through the attrition of old equipment, the less it is going to bother people.
Sure. That’s why I’m not suggesting going back to farming with horses. I think taking the carbon out could require more employees operating more equipment and doing other tasks, but it doesn’t ignore the amount of work that has to get done during certain times. I’m sorry if hooking on a new battery at the end of one of the rows seems too daunting for you. It is better than what will happen if we continue polluting the atmosphere.
We could make our electric farm equipment hybrids that burn cellulosic ethanol derived from farm waste, or maybe switchgrass or hemp or something grown for this purpose. Biofuel doesn’t have the same bad effect as petroleum, since its emmissions are in-cycle instead of forgotten dinosaur droppings.
So. Under our square kilometer of solar panels we’ll have: chicken coops. bats. nitrogen condenser. garages, barns, storage. Maybe a plant nursery, or hydroponics in symbiosis with, say, tilapia or other aquaculture? We really ought to take this opportunity to upgrade America’s diet from 100+ lbs of sugar a year to something that at least won’t kill them- the Constitution intends the government to look after the general welfare at least enough to ensure that we aren’t living an Upton Sinclair novel, even at the expense of corporate profits, IMHO.
But why would you use the biofuel to run a generator to charge batteries to put into all these expensive new robot/electric tractors instead of doing a cheap conversion on the existing vehicles and use the fuel directly? It’s more expensive, more complicated and less efficient use of the fuel.
With respect I think you missed my point - electric motors require copper windings and copper wire. For industrialised society to move to an electric future we need copper. And there is simply not enough on the planet.
Sometimes you have a small window between storms where you either must plant or harvest. The equipment used is too massive for electricity.
Now I could see a small electric tractor working in the utility role or some farm processes being run by an alternate fuel source. We actually do have an old wind turbine we once used to pump water. It burned out though years ago.
Also some of the newer barn designs are passive solar meaning the walls are semi porous allowing some natural light to come thru which reduces the amount of artificial light needed plus animals like natural light better.
There’s a lot of work being done to use carbon for motors and other needs of conductive metal. That will make machines much lighter. I’m also curious about the basis for your claim. The price of copper is higher than some metals, but not outrageouly so, and it is easily recyclable. If nothing else, aluminum can be used which may be expensive to refine but is abundant.
Why are you re-inventing the wheel (and in such a convoluted way)?
The Amish have agriculture without fossil fuels down pat. Been doing it for years, ney, generations!
I’m sorry if you’re upset that the real world gets in the way of your ideas. As I pointed out, there have been electric tractors for 40 years, and the industry still doesn’t produce anything larger than a garden model. There’s a reason for that, and it goes beyond hooking on a new battery at the end of a row.
Even if they get past the size and power limitations that are currently a problem, there will be massive infrastructure costs that have to be paid by someone. Your dismissive handwave that “we’ll have to raise taxes on the wealthy” underestimates the costs by orders of magnitude. Worldwide tractor sales for 2015 are expected to total $81 billion – that’s one year alone. At that rate, you can tax the Koch Brothers’ entire worth and be out of money in 15 months. Confiscate Warren Buffet’s holdings as well, and you might be able to pay for two years.
I’m not saying your completely off the mark here, just that you underestimate both the technological challenges and the cost. And you’ll do better getting people to see your point if you cut back on the condescension.
Actually current tractors use less fuel and are much more “green” than those of yesteryear in terms of emissions.
We also use methods like no-till which requires fewer passes over the fields plus conserves soil moisture.
Now I know people are into the idea of Amish being the ideal but they have obviously never worked with horses. Oh, and those nice ones at the petting zoo or even at horse riding academies are not the same as draft horses. Heavy draft horses used for farming eat 2-3 times as much and create more manure. They also require near daily care whereas with a tractor one can run it, and let it set until needed again.
I don’t mean to be condescending- I admitted I was mostly pulling this out of my ass right in the OP. All I want is radical agrarian reform- does that make me a bad guy?
I realize it is a big job, but this kind of proposal is starting to seem like the only rational course we can take. Doing nothing to change how we do things seems like a train on a track to a brick wall. Big changes are the only options I can see making any sense.
How to pay for the infrastructure and how to convince people to go along with this kind of thing is a sticky question. Again though, I want to point out that I intend for these kind of changes to take effect over decades. So, if the tractor market is $81 billion, and we’re phasing this in over ~30 years, that’s 3% of the market per year being replaced with the new thing, or $2.43 billion. That doesn’t include the infrastructure and dealing with new methods of course, but it is far more doable than trying to force it overnight, no?
You haven’t made the case. Without dealing with the costs there’s no way of knowing what the rational course of action would be. You could be wasting money, energy, and the environment worse than the problem you are trying to solve.
But here’s the thing. I’ve spent the last half hour trying to find out anything about electric-powered farm equipment, and all my searching keeps coming back to two things.
There is electric powered farm equipment, but nothing bigger than a riding mower, and
The major manufacturers keep saying they’re working on the engineering. Back in 2002, they said they’d have the problems worked out in 10 years. The only real advance I could find in the last 10 years is that they’ve come up with a charging interface strong enough to handle high-output batteries (and that was three years ago!)
Meantime, as Urbanredneck pointed out, there have been a lot of advances in diesel engine technology as well as farming practices in general that burn a lot less fuel than the old days. Not radical agrarian reform perhaps, but incremental steps in the right direction.
But if you can ever figure out the power problems, you could be a very wealthy radical.
