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This image: Colossal, autonomous gas-powered robots bulldoze over a few acres of homogeneous agricultural land under a blackened sky that pollutes pollution. All the trees are chopped down and no animals are in sight. Pesticides are dumped too much because humans no longer go to the fields. Machines do their job – they produce large quantities of food to feed our growing population – but not without ecological costs.
Or, anticipate another future: smaller robots cultivate mosaic plots of different crops, working around trees, streams, and wildlife in the natural landscape. They are supplied by renewable energy sources, such as the sun, wind or perhaps water. Agrochemicals are a thing of the past, as robots help keep the ecosystem in harmony, so pests and super grasses are far away. Eden is a futuristic garden with blue skies, green pastures and clean air.
What world would you like your food from?
These are the two futures imagined by Thomas Daum Hohenheim University’s agricultural economist, who works in food security and sustainable agriculture in places like Uganda and Bangladesh. It was published in July thought piece in Ecology and evolutionary trends which raised twin perspectives on an ecological utopia or dystopia, in an effort to discuss how the technological revolution in agriculture — also known as Agriculture 4.0 — can shape our future.
“Today’s agriculture needs to change,” says Daum, who is concerned that the disruptive effects of agricultural technology on the environment are not getting enough attention. Strategies to mitigate climate change As specified in the Paris Agreement it cannot be fulfilled without transforming how we grow food. “Even if you change all the other sectors,” he says, “if you don’t change agriculture, we will lose those goals.”
Even in a world without massive farm robots, large-scale agricultural practices are changing the environment. “Agriculture itself is a deliberate adaptation of the ecology of a particular place,” says Emily Reisman, a human geographer at the University at Buffalo. We remove wildlife, degrade the soil, and clean the land to grow food better, as well as spray chemicals to ward off pests and diseases.
When we add existing farm technologies to this mix, it gets worse. Machines such as tractors, harvesters, and crop control drones require controlled environments to operate normally in an efficient manner, so unpredictable factors must be eliminated as much as possible in industrialized agriculture. This means that year after year monocultures grow at an excellent plant level, with little variation, maturing and frequent application of herbicides, pesticides and fungicides to ensure uniformity. Standardization is the result of our need to mechanize agriculture, says Patrick Baur, an agroecologist at the University of Rhode Island. “That’s what the whole farming and farming ecosystem and farming process is adapting to meet the needs of the machine,” he says.
The environmental coherence required for industrialized agriculture has contributed to the loss of biodiversity, the variety of plant and animal life needed to keep ecosystems in balance. Biodiversity protects water quality, moderates global temperature by trapping carbon in the soil (rather than in the air), and ensures that pollinating crops and natural predators reduce the presence of pests. “Machines drastically reduce the life of insects, the life of microbes, and the diversity of flora and fauna,” says Baur, because much of it needs to be cleaned to function properly.
But why do we do it need food production machines? It’s a matter of economics. In order to sustain the constant demands of a growing population, agriculture requires more and more work. Food is also much cheaper than in the past, with farmers putting more pressure on them to get lower yields. As a result, if rural workers earn less money and leave it for better-paying industry opportunities, farmers may increasingly resort to mechanization to fill the gap.
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