In the garden tidy rows of onions stand in tidy rows, on the hill across the street the cows are grazing, and on the flats down past the hops barn the sheep have almost finished lambing. For the first few days the ewes and their offspring stick to each other, but once the lambs have their legs under them they form little cliques, prancing around the pasture and clicking their feet into the air.
There are three other lambs in a makeshift hog panel paddock up beside the garden, one of which was rejected by its mother and a pair that were part of a set of quadrupelets. This group requires four or five daily bottle feedings, which takes at least as much time as caring for the entire rest of the flock. Sheep, when things are going well, grow themselves.
I was thinking about this strange time allocation when checking up on self-driving tractors. While the numbers of self-driving cars are slowly increasing city by city, they remain the exclusive property of a few companies, and they require an infrastructure of humans on standby to assist them in unusual circumstances. Further, each state and many municipality makes a unique set of rules under which they must operate.
Self-driving tractors, on the other hand, are much less regulated, and modern tractors are so sophisticated that many can be retrofitted with a sensor array that converts them to full autonomy. Today, as I write this, tractors are out plowing and planting without any human oversight, and because big tractors are already much more expensive than the average car, a self-driving system is less of a relative price increase. I expect them to become the default in the grain belt within a few years.
I’m not sure what to think about the move from mechanized to roboticized farming. Tractors have been doing a lot of their own driving for years, albeit with a human right there to deal with emergencies. Does it really matter much if there’s a passenger monitoring from the cab instead of a farmer monitoring from a smartphone? Automation will increase the land a farmer can manage, but does the move from 2000 to 10000 acres make a real difference? I don’t know that it does.
Sheep will never be as productive as corn in terms of calories per acre, and the global appetite for cheap food appears to be limitless, so I understand why most of the midwest is cropland rather pasture. But sheep are remarkably self-sufficient. They can harvest their own food, convert it into meat, raise the next generation, and appear to have a quietly enjoyable time doing it. They do need a bit of human oversight, but things like bottle lambs are the outliers; mostly they take care of themselves.
Given this, it's funny to reflect on the unfathomable resources and human ingenuity have been bent to the task of figuring out a system in which robots get crops to grow without any human involvement when we’ve had self-driving sheep for millennia.